Albert Camus Quotes
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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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Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
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You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
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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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We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
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In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
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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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Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
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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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How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
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Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?
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We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
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I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.
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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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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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I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
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If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.
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The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.
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A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
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Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
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A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
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Paris is dirty. It has pigeons and black yards. The people have white skin.
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He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me.
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The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.