Albert Camus Quotes
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To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
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In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.
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...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.
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And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
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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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Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.
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The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
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Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.
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On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
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The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
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... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.
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If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
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We writers must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.
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In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.
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Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.
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It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
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Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
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All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
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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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If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.
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We are all special cases.
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Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
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In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.