In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.
Albert CamusI like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
Albert CamusGilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star.... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.
Albert CamusIn the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
Albert CamusIn the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
Albert CamusBelieve me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.
Albert CamusTo live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?
Albert CamusTo those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
Albert Camushow hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!
Albert CamusWhat gives value to travel is fear. It is a fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. I look upon it more as an occasion for testing.
Albert CamusThe modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
Albert CamusWhat made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
Albert CamusYou know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.
Albert CamusAnd 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.
Albert CamusBelieve me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.
Albert Camusโฆthere's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.
Albert CamusDon't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert CamusEvery 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.
Albert CamusWe know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'
Albert CamusIf, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Albert CamusWithout culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Albert CamusThose who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
Albert CamusIt was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
Albert CamusWe must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.
Albert Camus