Albert Camus Quotes
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Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
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The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
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We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.
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When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
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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 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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A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.
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For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn't know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.
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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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People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.
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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 Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.
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Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.
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It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
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I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
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I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
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Without freedom there is no art.
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Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
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...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
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Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.
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I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.
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Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
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I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.
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Once in the midst of a seemingly endless winter, I discovered within myself an invincible spring.