Albert Camus Quotes
-
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.
-
As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
-
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
-
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.
-
There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.
-
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
-
How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!
-
People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.
-
There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
-
At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.
-
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
-
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
-
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.
-
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.
-
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.
-
The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.
-
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
-
Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
-
The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.
-
Fate is not in man but around him.
-
Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.
-
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
-
The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.
-
The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.