Albert Camus Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
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Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
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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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Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
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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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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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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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Happiness is generous. It does not subsist on destruction.
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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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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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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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“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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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 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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I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
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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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It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.
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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.
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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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In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.