Albert Camus Quotes
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The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
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There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
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Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
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The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.
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The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.
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Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.
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Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star.... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.
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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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We are condemned to live together.
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If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
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But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
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I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
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But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.
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Even when one sits in the prisoner's dock, it is interesting to hear talk about oneself.
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Without work all life goes rotten.
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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.
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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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I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
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In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul.
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I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
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Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
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The look of success, when it is worn a certain way, would infuriate a jackass.