Albert Camus Quotes
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The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
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There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
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Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
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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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Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness or generosity. A universe - in other words a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.
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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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There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.
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It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
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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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The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.
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To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
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They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.
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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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I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.
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Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
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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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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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Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?
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Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
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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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Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
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The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
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There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
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Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.