Albert Camus Quotes
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It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.
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Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.
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Big tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because of all the wrinkles, they weren't dripping off. They spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film over his ruined face.
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You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.
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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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There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
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The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.
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Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.
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It is not true that the heart wears out - but the body creates this illusion.
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Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
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Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.
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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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The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it.
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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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It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.
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I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.
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Once in the midst of a seemingly endless winter, I discovered within myself an invincible spring.
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To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
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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.
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At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
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Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
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I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
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The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
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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.