Albert Camus Quotes
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Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss.
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When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
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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 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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We have art in order not to die of life.
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Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.
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Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
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Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.
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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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The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.
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Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
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Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.
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False judges are held up in the world's admiration and I alone know the true ones.
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In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.
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Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening's slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.
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Ah cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They are They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!
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The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
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Powerful, yes, that is the word that I constantly rolled on my tongue, I dreamed of absolute power, the kind that forces others tokneel, that forces the enemy to capitulate, finally converting him, and the more the enemy is blind, cruel, sure of himself, buried in his conviction, the more his admission proclaims the royalty of he who has brought on his defeat.
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In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.
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I was comfortable in all, I admit, but at the same time, nothing satisfied me. Each joy made me seek another.
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Happiness too is inevitable.
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For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.
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Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.
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By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.