Albert Camus Quotes
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There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.
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N'attendez pas le Jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours.
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Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.
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In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.
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This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.
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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.
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The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.
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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.
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Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.
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Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
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... 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.
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We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
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Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.
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My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.
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At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.
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For years I've wanted to live according to everyone else's morals. I've forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth-after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.
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After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace. "Yes, he replied. "The path of sympathy.
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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
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I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.
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We Raymond and Meursault stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.
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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
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I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.
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If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.