Albert Camus Quotes
-
If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.
-
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.
-
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.
-
Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
-
Morality, when formal, devours.
-
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.
-
The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
-
What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?
-
To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless.
-
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
-
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
-
No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.
-
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
-
A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.
-
Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone - all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.
-
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
-
To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.
-
One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.
-
Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
-
At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.
-
I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.