Albert Camus Quotes
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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.
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Fate is not in man but around him.
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Murder is terribly exhausting.
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Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
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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.
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At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she – or he – would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.
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In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
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Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
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N'attendez pas le Jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours.
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Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
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Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
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Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.
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There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
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There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.
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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
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The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
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Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.
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The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.
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L'homme enfin n'est pas entièrement coupable - il n'a pas commencé l'histoire - ni tout à fait innocent, puisqu'il la continue.
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The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.
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'What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?''I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps.''Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?' 'Comprehension.'
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Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.
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To cut short this question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?