Albert Camus Quotes
-
Some other memories of the funeral have stuck in my mind. The old boy’s face, for instance, when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. His eyes were streaming with tears, of exhaustion or distress, or both together. But because of the wrinkles they couldn’t flow down. They spread out, crisscrossed, and formed a smooth gloss on the old, worn face.
-
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
-
Art does not tolerate reason.
-
Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
-
The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
-
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
-
Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
-
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
-
The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
-
If one could only say just once: 'this is clear', all would be saved.
-
To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
-
The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
-
There is a metaphysical honour in ending the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.... War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. "Art and nothing but art", said Nietzsche, "we have art in order not to die of the truth."
-
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
-
As for those whose role it is to love us – I mean, relatives and in-laws – It's a different tune. They find the right word, but it's usually the one that wounds.
-
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
-
It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.
-
My great idea is that we must forgive the Pope. First of all, he needs it more than anyone else. Besides, it is the only way of placing oneself above him.
-
Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.
-
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.
-
I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.
-
Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
-
I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
-
There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.