Albert Camus Quotes
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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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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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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
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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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The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
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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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The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.
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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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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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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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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?
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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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The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.
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Fate is not in man but around him.
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There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
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When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
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Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
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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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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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L'homme enfin n'est pas entièrement coupable - il n'a pas commencé l'histoire - ni tout à fait innocent, puisqu'il la continue.