Albert Camus Quotes
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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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A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
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Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.
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I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
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There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.
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“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.” “On both, perhaps.”
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Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
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It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.
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The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.
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A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.
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Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone ... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.
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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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I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.
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I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
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You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.
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Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
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What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.
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The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
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Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
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How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?
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Indeed, men never know how to love. nothing satisfies them. All they know is to dream, to imagine new duties, to look for new countries and new homes. While we women, we know that we must hasten to love, to share the same bed, hold hands, and fear absence. When we women love, we dream of nothing.
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Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.
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This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
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On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.