When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the 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.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
ALBERT CAMUS, attributed, 2012: Waking of the Prophets
There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
ALBERT CAMUS, attributed, The Best Liberal Quotes Ever
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.
The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Stranger
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
ALBERT CAMUS, "Three Interviews," Lyrical and Critical Essays
The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art, "is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
ALBERT CAMUS, "The Failing of Prophecy"
I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Stranger
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
ALBERT CAMUS, attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Stranger
With rebellion, awareness is born.
ALBERT CAMUS, attributed, The Estranged God
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents.
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
ALBERT CAMUS, "The Absurd Man", The Myth of Sisyphus
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
ALBERT CAMUS, Notebooks, 1935-1951
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
ALBERT CAMUS, Notebooks 1951-1959
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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.
ALBERT CAMUS, "Helen's Exile", The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays
To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Rebel
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
ALBERT CAMUS, Return to Tipasa
Integrity has no need of rules.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays
To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries -- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
He had always followed his routine, but now he had difficulty painting, even in moments of solitude. He would spend these moments looking at the sky. He had always been distracted and absorbed, but now he became a dreamer. He would think about painting, about his vocation, instead of painting. "I love to paint," he still said to himself, and the hand holding the paintbrush would hang at his side as he listened to a distant radio.
ALBERT CAMUS, Exile and the Kingdom
Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
ALBERT CAMUS, Notebooks 1951-1959
There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.
ALBERT CAMUS, "Between Yes and No", World Review, March 1950
Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality.
ALBERT CAMUS, American Journals
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
ALBERT CAMUS, Happy Death
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus
I don't want to be a genius--I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
ALBERT CAMUS, Notebooks
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.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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