Albert Camus Quotes
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Morality, when formal, devours.
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There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
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He's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.
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Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.
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In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
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Absurd- that is the light mind that establishes its own borders.
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And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
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Chacun exige d'e" tre innocent, a' tout prix, me" me si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel. Everyone insists on his or her innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven.
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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.
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Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
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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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I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.
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One grows out of pity when it's useless.
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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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The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
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The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
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Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.
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Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
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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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What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?
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Men die and they are not happy.
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Have pity, Lord, on those who love and are separated.
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Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.
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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."