Albert Camus Quotes
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In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
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We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.
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In order to exist, man must rebel.
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There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.
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And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
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The act of love . . . is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.
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Find your happiness in yourself.
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The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
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Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
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I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.
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Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
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Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
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The Four Conditions of Happiness: Life in the open air, Love for another being,Freedom from ambition,Creation.
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I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
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That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.
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But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.
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Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
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I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.
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What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
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Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. (This quotation is from Notebook IV in Notebooks: 1942-1951, not Myth of Sisyphus. The quotation appears in none of Camus books you find in bookstores).
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It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
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There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.
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Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
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What doesn't kill you make you stronger and stronger.