Albert Camus Quotes
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I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.
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Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.
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We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
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In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
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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.
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The world expects of Christians that they will raise their voices so loudly and clearly and so formulate their protest that not even the simplest man can have the slightest doubt about what they are saying. Further, the world expects of Christians that they will eschew all fuzzy abstractions and plant themselves squarely in front of the bloody face of history. We stand in need of folk who have determined to speak directly and unmistakably and come what may, to stand by what they have said.
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We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.
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It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.
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To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.
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Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
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To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.
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If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
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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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We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.
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It is better to burn than to disappear.
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The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.
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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?
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The mistake that men make is that they do not believe in theater. Otherwise, they would know that every man is allowed to play thecelestial tragedies and to become god. All he has to do is harden his heart.
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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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The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
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That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
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The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.
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We can't do without dominating others or being served.... The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.