Albert Camus Quotes
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In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.
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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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Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.
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La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent.
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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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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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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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Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
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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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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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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
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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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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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'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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One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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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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Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
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One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
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Why must one love rarely to love well?
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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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When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. … there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.
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There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
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Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death 'He is going to pay his debt to society,' but: 'They are going to cut off his head.' It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.
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The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.