Albert Camus Quotes
-
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
-
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.
-
Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
-
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.
-
The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
-
What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?
-
There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.
-
How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!
-
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-
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.
-
The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.
-
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?
-
To think is first of all to create a world or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing.
-
Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.
-
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
-
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
-
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!!'
-
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.
-
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
-
For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.
-
If the world were clear, art would not exist.