Albert Camus Quotes
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Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.
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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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The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.
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For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
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In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
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There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.
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Thus, I always began by assuming the worst; my appeal was dismissed. That meant, of course, I was to die. Sooner than others, obviously. 'But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.' And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-- since, in either case, other men will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.
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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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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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If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
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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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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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It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
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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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The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.
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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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A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.
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The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.
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But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.
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An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
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Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
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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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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.