Albert Camus Quotes
-
As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
-
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
-
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
-
Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
-
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
-
…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
-
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
-
There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.
-
There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.
-
Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
-
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.
-
Fate is not in man but around him.
-
The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.
-
The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
-
Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
-
How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!
-
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
-
After all, I do not have so many ways of proving that I am free. We is always free at the expense of someone else. It is a bother,but it is normal.
-
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.
-
If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda, that does not condemn their entire philosophy. But it does lead to the suspicion that one aspect of their thought, or of their logic, can lead to these appalling conclusions.