Albert Camus Quotes
-
Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.
-
One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.
-
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
-
'Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.'
-
I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
-
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
-
Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.
-
Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. 'No artist tolerates reality,' says Nietzsche.
-
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
-
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
-
The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.
-
Il me restait peu de temps. Je ne voulais pas le perdre avec Dieu.
-
In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.
-
I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.
-
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.
-
... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.
-
If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.
-
The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting.
-
He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.
-
O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.
-
It is easy to shield the outer body from poisoned arrows, but it is impossible to shield the mind from the poisoned darts that originate within itself. Greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism - these four poisoned darts originate within the mind and infect it with deadly poison.
-
There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.
-
My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.
-
Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.