Albert Camus Quotes
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Do you believe in God, doctor?" No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.
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In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.
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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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Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
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Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.
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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.
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... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonabledesire and claims to give life a form it does not have.
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Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.
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There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.
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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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Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
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The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.
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A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
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The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.
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No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.
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It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
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That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.
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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true.
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More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.
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Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
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In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence.
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I was tormented by my desire for a woman ... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.