Albert Camus Quotes
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But too many people now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance, even if they have to trample somewhat on the one who has been there so long.
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Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
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There is no frontier between being and appearing.
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Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.
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And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
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There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
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The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.
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They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.
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The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
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People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.
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The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
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The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.
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The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
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No ends, simply means.
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Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.
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To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.
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True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.
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Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
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Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth-with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its goodness.
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I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb's admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist's.
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I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.
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The act of love is a confession.
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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics-\-\-in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.