November 16.
He said: We must have one love, one great love in our life, since it gives us an alibi for all the moments when we are filled with motiveless despair.
I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It's not very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity.
A time comes when one can no longer feel the emotion of love. The only thing left is tragedy. Living for someone or for something no longer has any meaning. Nothing seems to keep its meaning except the idea of dying for something.
Thought is always out in front. It sees too far, farther than the body which lives in the present.
Tragedy forms a closed world, in which we stumble over and knock against obstacles. In the theater, tragedy must be born and die in the restricted area of the stage.
To abolish hope is to bring the thought back to the body. And the body is doomed to perish.
The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.
To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself.
All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime…it is itself an absurd phenomenon.
We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.
This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
Our fate stands before us and we provoke him. Less out of pride than out of awareness of our ineffectual condition. We, too, sometimes feel pity for ourselves. ... Yet the most daring among us are the ones who feel it.
For the existentials negation is their God.
Longer Version:
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.
Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.
None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.
I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.
Tyrants know there is in the work of art an emancipatory force, which is mysterious only to those who do not revere it. Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.
The ancients, even though they believed in destiny , believed primarily in nature , in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.
Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.
There's so much wickedness in the world, she said. So what can you expect?
Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.
Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.
The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.
No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.
The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.
Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.
In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.
Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.
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.
I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.
You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.
Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come.
With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If only the significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be he history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.
Chacun exige d'e tre innocent, a' tout prix, me me si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel. Everyone insists on his or her innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven.
A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.
Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.
I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored.
Some cry: 'Love me!' Others: 'Don't love me!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!'
Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.
When a war breaks out, people say: It's too stupid; it can't last long. But though a war may well be too stupid, that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
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.
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.
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.