 |
Revolution
|
|
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all -- he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Self-love
|
|
|
True 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 Camus
|
|
Sin
|
|
|
If there is sin against life, it consists in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Solitude
|
|
|
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Sound, Noise
|
|
|
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Struggle
|
|
|
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Suffering
|
|
|
In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Suicide
|
|
|
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Symbols
|
|
|
The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Sympathy
|
|
|
God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Thought
|
|
|
A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Truth
|
|
|
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Twentieth Century
|
|
|
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.
-Albert Camus
|
|
|
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Tyranny
|
|
|
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Virtue
|
|
|
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Women
|
|
|
These women behind the store windows? Dreams, sir, dreams at bargain prices, a trip to the Indies! These people perfume themselves with spices. You enter, they close the curtains, and the trip begins. The gods descend on the nude bodies and the islands drift, demented, with the tousled hair of palm trees in the breeze.
-Albert Camus
|
|
Work
|
|
|
Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence His Or Her heart first opened.
-Albert Camus
|
|
|
The 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 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, an existentialist short essay
|
|
World
|
|
|
The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
-Albert Camus
|
Books by and about Albert Camus