Albert Camus Quotes
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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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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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... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.
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I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.
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The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
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Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
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We are all special cases.
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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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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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The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
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Maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occured to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.
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Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.
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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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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.
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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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And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
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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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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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Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.
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Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.
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No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.
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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.