Albert Camus Quotes
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Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
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The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
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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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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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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.
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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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The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.
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Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
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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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Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.
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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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For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.
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So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.
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For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
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We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.
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The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.
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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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When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
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Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.
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The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.
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Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s only living insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the same for everyone.
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'The real saint', Baudelaire pretends to think, 'is he who flogs and kills people for their own good.' His argument will be heard. A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.
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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.
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Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.