Albert Camus Quotes
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…. 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.
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How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!
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To think is first of all to create a world or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing.
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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
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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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What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?
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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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Murder is terribly exhausting.
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Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.
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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
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But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
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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.
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Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
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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.
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In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
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The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.
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To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.
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You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.
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Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
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I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.
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Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'
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At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.
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The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.