Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Albert CamusI 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 CamusTrue debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.
Albert CamusBecause,' 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.
Albert CamusEvery man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
Albert CamusTruth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.
Albert CamusA lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
Albert CamusWe always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Albert CamusI have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
Albert CamusWe can't do without dominating others or being served.... The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.
Albert CamusOnly the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.
Albert CamusLife can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
Albert CamusI leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile 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's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camushe's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.
Albert CamusHistory, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
Albert CamusIn that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.
Albert CamusWe 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.
Albert CamusFor 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.
Albert CamusForever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
Albert CamusAll systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
Albert CamusOur civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents
Albert CamusInstead 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.
Albert CamusPolitics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.
Albert CamusFor what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn't know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.
Albert CamusIt is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
Albert CamusAfter all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Albert CamusAnd for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.
Albert CamusThe gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
Albert CamusIn 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.
Albert Camus