Albert Camus Quotes
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The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.
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Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
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Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.
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Ce que, finalement, je sais de plus sûr sur la morale et les obligations des hommes, c'est au football que je le dois.
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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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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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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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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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'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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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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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.
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If the world were clear, art would not exist.
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I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.
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Ironic philosophies produce passionate works. Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity! And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life.
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Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.
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But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.
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I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.
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When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.
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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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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 greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world - and to pay attention to man.
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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.
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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.