Albert Camus Quotes
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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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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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Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
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Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.
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Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?
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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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Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
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But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.
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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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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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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.
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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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I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.
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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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Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.
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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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Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.
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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?
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The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
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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.
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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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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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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.