Albert Camus Quotes - Page 2

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
Albert Camus
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
Albert Camus
You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.
Albert Camus
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
Albert Camus
There is something divine in mindless beauty.
Albert Camus
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
...luck is not to be coerced.
Albert Camus
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
Albert Camus
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.
Albert Camus
You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.
Albert Camus
But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.
Albert Camus
. But itis obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is preciselylife that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis.To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.
Albert Camus
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Albert Camus
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
Albert Camus
The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable
Albert Camus
If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.
Albert Camus
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
Albert Camus
Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.
Albert Camus
We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.
Albert Camus
This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
Albert Camus
The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.
Albert Camus
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neithersterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain,in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man'sheart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy
Albert Camus
You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people - which means there is no way out. Happy and judged or absolved and miserable.
Albert Camus
As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
Albert Camus
And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.
Albert Camus
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Albert Camus
How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.
Albert Camus
There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four.
Albert Camus
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
Albert Camus
Existence is illusory and it is eternal.
Albert Camus
If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Albert Camus
After awhile you could get used to anything.
Albert Camus
We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.
Albert Camus
In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions
Albert Camus
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Albert Camus
Stupidity has a knack for getting its way.
Albert Camus
There is only one class of men, the privileged class
Albert Camus
O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!
Albert Camus
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Albert Camus
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.
Albert Camus
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
Albert Camus
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it
Albert Camus
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Albert Camus
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
Albert Camus
Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence
Albert Camus
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
Albert Camus
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
Albert Camus
On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.
Albert Camus
Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder.
Albert Camus
But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
Albert Camus
So it came to this, that— against the grain, no doubt—the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order! This, I thought, was a flaw in the system; and, on the face of it, my view was sound enough. On the other hand, I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system. It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch.
Albert Camus
February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.
Albert Camus
Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.
Albert Camus
Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.
Albert Camus
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong t
Albert Camus
There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
Albert Camus