Quotes by Albert Camus (Page 2 of 3)

It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.

A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.

God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.

After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.

Ale zawsze nadchodzi godzina w historii, kiedy ten, co ośmiela się powiedzieć, że dwa i dwa to cztery, jest karany śmiercią.

Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me.

Even when one sits in the prisoner's dock, it is interesting to hear talk about oneself.

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.

Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.

What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

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.

Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.

One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.

Everything is true, and nothing is true!

Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.

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.

We Raymond and Meursault stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.

Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.

The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.

At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.

I have not stopped loving that which is sacred in this world.

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.

I love life -- that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.

The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.

An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.

The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth , but it will be ruled over by men a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Cassars, because they were the first to understand and later, with time, by all men.

We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves.

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

When the body is sad, the heart languishes.

The sense of doing good , the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.

I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?

The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss.

I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.

The soul of a murderer is blind.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.

No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.

For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true.

Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.

Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.

In the long run one gets used to anything.

There are truths but no truth.

A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.

Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty there is someone who quivers inside me.

Do you believe in God, doctor? No -- but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.

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?

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

There's no worse punishment than worthless, hopeless labor.

What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.

I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

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.

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. (The Plague).

Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called the act of love, or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

Everthing is true and nothing is true!

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

A work of art is a confession.

Those who write clearly have readers.

I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me.

I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

The only way out of international dictatorship is to place international law above governments, which means ... that there must be a parliament for making it, and that parliament must be constituted by means of worldwide elections in which all nations will take part.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.

If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.

There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

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.

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

In that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself -- like a brother, really -- I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.

I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.

I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.

He was one
of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good
feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a
capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

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.

When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

Art and revolt will die only with the last man.

We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.

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.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.

Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone ... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.

In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.

God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.

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.

From Pandora's Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.

To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.

The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.

There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.

The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.

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.

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

The world is unimportant and whoever recognizes this conquers his liberty.

To remain a man in today's world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.

Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.

You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us.

I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.

But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.

It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.

I knew a pure heart who refused tot be mistrustful.... He had written at his doorstep: From wherever you are, enter and be welcome. Who do you think responded to this lovely invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and gutted him.

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.

To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.

Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yeild nothing on the plane of freedom.

Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.

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.

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.

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Betrayal answers betrayal, the mask of love is answered by the disappearance of love.

For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.

Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.

On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.

Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.

I didn't like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.