Albert Camus Quotes
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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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The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.
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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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Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.
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The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.
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You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
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Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
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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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My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.
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Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
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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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The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.
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In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
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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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I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
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As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
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Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
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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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“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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As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla. Actually his god was an argument at a political meeting and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of speeches.
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But who would dare condemn me in this world with no judges, where no one is innocent!
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It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.
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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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The sense of doing good , the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.