Albert Camus Quotes
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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
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Have pity, Lord, on those who love and are separated.
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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.
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Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
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Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.
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It is not true that the heart wears out - but the body creates this illusion.
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We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'
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You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
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The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
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The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.
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A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
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Morality, when formal, devours.
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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.
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History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
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It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
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One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
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Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
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A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
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Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.
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The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it.
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It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
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But 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 schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.
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Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.
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Liberty is a choreand a long-distance race, quite solitary, quite exhausting.