Albert Camus Quotes
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...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
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They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.
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... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.
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Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
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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.
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I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.
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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 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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One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
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I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.
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I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
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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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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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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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Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
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We have art in order not to die of life.
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Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
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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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Many artists, even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!
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To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
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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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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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God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.
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But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.