Background Image

...

For The First Time In A Long Time I Thought About Maman. I Felt As If I Understood Why At The End Of Her Life She Had Taken A 'fiancé,' Why She Had Played At Beginning Again. Even There, In That Home Where Lives Were Fading Out, Evening Was A Kind Of Wistful Respite. So Close To Death, Maman Must Have Felt Free Then And Ready To Live It All Again. Nobody, Nobody Had The Right To Cry Over Her. And I Felt Ready To Live It All Again Too.

-Albert Camus

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

For The First Time

Albert Camus

...

For The First Time In A Long Time I Thought About Maman. I Felt As If I Understood Why At The End Of Her Life She Had Taken A 'fiancé,' Why She Had Played At Beginning Again. Even There, In That Home Where Lives Were Fading Out, Evening Was A Kind Of Wistful Respite. So Close To Death, Maman Must Have Felt Free Then And Ready To Live It All Again. Nobody, Nobody Had The Right To Cry Over Her. And I Felt Ready To Live It All Again Too.

Views: 85361

Topic

More From Albert Camus

It Is Terrifying To See How Easily, In Certain People, All Dignity Collapses. Yet When You Think About It, This Is Quite Normal Since They Only Maintain This Dignity By Constantly Striving Against Their Own Nature.

Sometimes, From Beyond The Skycrapers, The Cry Of A Tugboat Finds You In Your Insomnia, And You Remember That This Desert Of Iron And Cement Is An Island.

Beauty Is Unbearable, Drives Us To Despair, Offering Us For A Minute The Glimpse Of An Eternity That We Should Like To Stretch Out Over The Whole Of Time.

That Is Love, To Give Away Everything, To Sacrifice Everything, Without The Slightest Desire To Get Anything In Return.3

Those Who Lack The Courage Will Always Find A Philosophy To Justify It.

There Exists An Obvious Fact That Seems Utterly Moral: Namely, That A Man Is Always Prey To His Truths. Once He Has Admitted Them, He Cannot Free Himself From Them. One Has To Pay Something. A Man Who Has Become Conscious Of The Absurd Is Forever Bound To It.

You Have To Be Very Rich Or Very Poor To Live Without A Trade.

In Order To Understand The World, One Has To Turn Away From It On Occasion.

Likewise And During Every Day Of An Unillustrious Life, Time Carries Us. But A Moment Always Comes When We Have To Carry It.

Today We Are Always As Ready To Judge As We Are To Fornicate.

There Is But One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem And That Is 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 Afterwards. These Are Games; One Must First Answer.

There Was The Same Dazzling Red Glare. The Sea Gasped For Air With Each Shallow, Stifled Wave That Broke On The Sand. ...with Every Blade Of Light That Flashed Off The Sand, From A Bleached Shell Or A Peice Of Broken Glass, My Jaws Tightened. I Walked For A Long Time.

It Is Not Your Paintings I Like, It Is Your Painting.

Autumn Is A Second Spring When Every Leaf Is A Flower.

Death Means Nothing To Men Like Me. It's The Event That Proves Them Right.

No Human Being, Even The Most Passionately Loved And Passionately Loving, Is Ever In Our Possession.

We Don't Have The Time To Completely Be Ourselves. We Only Have The Room To Be Happy.

At A Certain Level Of Suffering Or Injustice No One Can Do Anything For Anyone. Pain Is Solitary.

When One Has Extensively Pondered About Men, As A Career Or As A Vocation, One Sometimes Feels Nostalgic For Primates. At Least They Do Not Have Ulterior Motives.

Have Pity, Lord, On Those Who Love And Are Separated.

If The Descent Is Thus Sometimes Performed In Sorrow, It Can Also Take Place In Joy.

Sometimes, Carrying On, Just Carrying On, Is The Superhuman Achievement.

Accept Life, Take It As It Is? Stupid. The Means Of Doing Otherwise? Far From Our Having To Take It, It Is Life That Possesses Us And On Occasion Shuts Our Mouths.

To Cut Short This Question Of The Law Of Retaliation, We Must Note That Even In Its Primitive Form It Can Operate Only Between Two Individuals Of Whom One Is Absolutely Innocent And The Other Absolutely Guilty. The Victim, To Be Sure, Is Innocent. But Can The Society That Is Supposed To Represent The Victim Lay Claim To Innocence?

L'absurde Est La Notion Essentielle Et La Premie' Re Ve? Rite? . The Absurd Is The Fundamental Idea And The First Truth.

I Felt The Urge To Reassure Him That I Was Like Everybody Else, Just Like Everybody Else.

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.

We 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.

What Can A Meaning Outside My Condition Mean To Me? I Can Understand Only In Human Terms. What I Touch, What Resists Me - That I Understand. And These Two Certainties - My Appetite For The Absolute And For Unity And The Impossibility Of Reducing This World To A Rational And Reasonable Principle - I Also Know That I Cannot Reconcile Them. What Other Truth Can I Admit Without Lying, Without Bringing In A Hope I Lack And Which Means Nothing Within The Limits Of My Conditions?

What's Natural Is The Microbe. All The Rest-heath, Integrity, Purity (if You Like)-is A Product Of The Human Will, Of A Vigilance That Must Never Falter. The Good Man, The Man Who Infects Hardly Anyone, Is The Man Who Has The Fewest Lapses Of Attention.

Those Who Write Clearly Have Readers.

Writers And Writing

What Is Called A Reason For Living Is Also An Excellent Reason For Dying.

For If There Is A Sin Against Life, It Consists Perhaps Not So Much In Despairing Of Life As In Hoping For Another Life And In Eluding The Implacable Grandeur Of This Life.

For Instance, I Never Complained That My Birthday Was Overlooked; People Were Even Surprised, With A Touch Of Admiration, By My Discretion On This Subject. But The Reason For My Disinterestedness Was Even More Discreet: I Longed To Be Forgotten In Order To Be Able To Complain To Myself... Once My Solitude Was Thoroughly Proved, I Could Surrender To The Charms Of A Virile Self-pity.

That Must Be Wonderful; I Have No Idea Of What It Means.

Murder Is Terribly Exhausting.

I Cling Like A Miser To The Freedom That Disappears As Soon As There Is An Excess Of Things.

Only He Who Is Uncompromising As To His Rights Maintains The Sense Of Duty.

History Only Exists, In The Final Analysis, For God.

Man Is The Only Creature That Refuses To Be What He Is.

Thinking Is Learning All Over Again How To See, Directing One's Consciousness, Making Of Every Image A Privileged Place.

Proof Is Never Definitive, After All; One Has To Begin Again With Each New Person.

The Danger Of Lectures Is That They Create The Illusion Of Teaching For Teachers, And The Illusion Of Learning For Learners.

A Liking For Truth At Any Cost Is A Passion That Spares Nothing And That Nothing Resists. It's A Vice, At Times A Comfort, Or A Selfishness.

But What Are A Hundred Million Deaths? When One Has Served In A War, One Hardly Knows What A Dead Man Is, After A While. And Since A Dead Man Has No Substance Unless One Has Actually Seen Him Dead, A Hundred Million Corpses Broadcast Through History Are No More Than A Puff Of Smoke In The Imagination.

He Who Despairs Of The Human Condition Is A Coward, But He Who Has Hope For It Is A Fool.

After All, I Do Not Have So Many Ways Of Proving That I Am Free. We Is Always Free At The Expense Of Someone Else. It Is A Bother,but It Is Normal.

The Real Passion Of The Twentieth Century Is Servitude.

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.

You Will Never Live If You Are Looking For The Meaning Of Life.

Independence Is Earned By A Few Words Of Cheap Confidence

The Need To Be Right Is The Sign Of A Vulgar Mind.

In That Night Alive With Signs And Stars, I Opened Myself To The Gentle Indifference Of The World. Finding It So Much Like Myself--like A Brother, Really--i Felt That I Had Been Happy And That I Was Happy Again.

To Know Oneself, One Should Assert Oneself.

What Must Be Remembered In Any Case Is That Secret Complicity That Joins The Logical And The Everyday To The Tragic.

The Mistake That Men Make Is That They Do Not Believe In Theater. Otherwise, They Would Know That Every Man Is Allowed To Play Thecelestial Tragedies And To Become God. All He Has To Do Is Harden His Heart.

To Insure The Adoration Of A Theorem For Any Length Of Time, Faith Is Not Enough, A Police Force Is Needed As Well.

Law Enforcement

If God Did Not Exist, We Should Have To Invent Him. If God Did Exist, We Should Have To Abolish Him.

In Every Guilty Man, There Is Some Innocence. This Makes Every Absolute Condemnation Revolting.

When Love Ceases To Be Tragic It Is Something Else And The Individual Again Throws Himself In Search Of Tragedy.

Happiness And Love

Thus, In A Middle Course Between These Heights And Depths, They Drifted Through Life Rather Than Lived, The Prey Of Aimless Days And Sterile Memories, Like Wandering Shadows That Could Have Acquired Substance Only By Consenting To Root Themselves In The Solid Earth Of Their Distress.

I Can Feel This Heart Inside Me And I Conclude It Exists. I Can Touch This World And I Also Conclude That It Exists. All My Knowledge Ends At This Point. The Rest Is Hypothesis.

Their Guilt Made Me Eloquent Because I Was Not Its Victim.

It Is Always Easy To Be Logical. It Is Almost Impossible To Be Logical To The Bitter End.

I Have Never Been Able To Renounce The Light, The Pleasure Of Being, And The Freedom In Which I Grew Up.

We Spend Our Days In Deliberating, And We End Them Without Coming To Any Resolve.

[paris] Is Dirty. It Has Pigeons And Black Yards. The People Have White Skin.

Like Great Works, Deep Feelings Always Mean More Than They Are Conscious Of Saying.

Great Feelings Take With Them Their Own Universe, Splendid Or Abject. They Light Up With Their Passion An Exclusive World In Which They Recognize Their Climate.

The Principles Which Men Give To Themselves End By Overwhelming Their Noblest Intentions.

The Society Based On Production Is Only Productive, Not Creative.

A Guilty Conscience Needs To Confess. A Work Of Art Is A Confession.

Youth Is Above All A Collection Of Possibilities.

You Will Always Win If You Make An Effort, No Matter How Much. However, If You Failed It Means You Were Too Lazy.

... Unhappiness Is Like Marriage. We Believe We Chose It, But Then It Is Choosing Us. That Is How It Is, We Can Do Nothing About It.

At The Heart Of All Beauty Lies Something Inhuman.

The Most Loathsome Materialism Is Not The Kind People Usually Think Of, But The Sort That Attempts To Let Dead Ideas Pass For Living Realities, Diverting Into Sterile Myths The Stubborn And Lucid Attention We Give To What We Have Within Us That Must Forever Die.

As A Remedy To Life In Society I Would Suggest The Big City. Nowadays, It Is The Only Desert Within Our Means.

I Felt As I Hadn't Felt For Ages. I Had A Foolish Desire To Burst Into Tears. For The First Time I'd Realized How All These People Loathed Me.

How Hard It Must Be To Live Only With What One Knows And What One Remembers, Cut Off From What One Hopes For!

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.

How Hard It Is, How Bitter It Is To Become A Man!

The Absurd Is Essentially A Divorce. It Lies In Neither Of The Elements Compared; It Is Born Of Their Confrontation.

I Feel Like Getting Married, Or Committing Suicide, Or Subscribing To L'illustration. Something Desperate, You Know.

What Doesn't Kill You Make You Stronger And Stronger

Makes You Stronger

If There Is A Soul, It Is A Mistake To Believe That It Is Given To Us Fully Created. It Is Created Here, Throughout A Whole Life. And Living Is Nothing Else But That Long And Painful Bringing Forth.

Methods Of Thought Which Claim To Give The Lead To Our World In The Name Of Revolution Have Become, In Reality, Ideologies Of Consent And Not Of Rebellion.

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.

Culture: The Cry Of Men In Face Of Their Destiny.

The World Expects Of Christians That They Will Raise Their Voices So Loudly And Clearly And So Formulate Their Protest That Not Even The Simplest Man Can Have The Slightest Doubt About What They Are Saying. Further, The World Expects Of Christians That They Will Eschew All Fuzzy Abstractions And Plant Themselves Squarely In Front Of The Bloody Face Of History. We Stand In Need Of Folk Who Have Determined To Speak Directly And Unmistakably And Come What May, To Stand By What They Have Said.

I Am Too Much In Love With My Lies And Hypocrisies Not To Confess Them Fervently.

From Paul To Stalin, The Popes Who Have Chosen Caesar Have Prepared The Way For Caesars Who Quickly Learn To Despise Popes.

If Those Whom We Begin To Love Could Know Us As We Were Before Meeting Them They Could Perceive What They Have Made Of Us.

Happiness And Love

I Have Never Been Able, Really, To Regret Anything In All My Life. I Have Always Been Far Much Too Absorbed In The Present Moment Or The Immediate Future To Think Back.

One Of The Only Coherent Philosophical Positions Is Thus Revolt. It Is A Constant Confrontation Between Man And His Own Obscurity.

In The Midst Of Winter, I Found There Was, Within Me, An Invincible Summer. And That Makes Me Happy. For It Says That No Matter How Hard The World Pushes Against Me, Within Me, There’s Something Stronger – Something Better, Pushing Right Back.

We Are Condemned To Live Together.

I Hadn't Understood How Days Could Be Both Long And Short At The Same Time: Long To Live Through, Maybe, But So Drawn Out That They Ended Up Flowing Into One Another. They Lost Their Names. Only 'yesterday' And 'tomorrow' Still Had Any Meaning For Me.

This Very Heart Which Is Mine Will Forever Remain Indefinable To Me. Between The Certainty I Have Of My Existence And The Content I Try To Give To That Assurance, The Gap Will Never Be Filled. Forever I Shall Be A Stranger To Myself.

The Evil That Is In The World Always Comes Of Ignorance, And Good Intentions May Do As Much Harm As Malevolence, If They Lack Understanding.

Some Other Memories Of The Funeral Have Stuck In My Mind. The Old Boy’s Face, For Instance, When He Caught Up With Us For The Last Time, Just Outside The Village. His Eyes Were Streaming With Tears, Of Exhaustion Or Distress, Or Both Together. But Because Of The Wrinkles They Couldn’t Flow Down. They Spread Out, Crisscrossed, And Formed A Smooth Gloss On The Old, Worn Face.

This Divorce Between Man And His Life, The Actor And His Setting, Is Properly The Feeling Of Absurdity.

Absurdity Of Life

We're Going Forward, But Nothing Changes.

When The Imagination Sleeps, Words Are Emptied Of Their Meaning: A Deaf Population Absent-mindedly Registers The Condemnation Of A Man. ... There Is No Other Solution But To Speak Out And Show The Obscenity Hidden Under The Verbal Cloak.

If It Adapts Itself To What The Majority Of Our Society Wants, Art Will Be A Meaningless Recreation.

My Dear Friend, We Mustn't Give Them Even The Slightest Excuse To Judge Us! Otherwise, We End Up In Pieces.

He Had Opened His Heart To The Sublime Indifference Of The Universe

There Is But One Freedom, To Put Oneself Right With Death. After That Everything Is Possible. I Cannot Force You To Believe In God. Believing In God Amounts To Coming To Terms With Death. When You Have Accepted Death, The Problem Of God Will Be Solved, And Not The Reverse.

We Get Into The Habit Of Living Before Acquiring The Habit Of Thinking. In That Race Which Daily Hastens Us Towards Death, The Body Maintains Its Irreparable Lead.

They Came To Know The Incorrigible Sorrow Of All Prisoners And Exiles, Which Is To Live In Company With A Memory That Serves No Purpose.

I Conceived At Least One Great Love In My Life, Of Which I Was Always The Object.

The World I Live In Is Loathsome To Me, But I Feel One With The Men Who Suffer In It

On Certain Mornings, As We Turn A Corner, An Exquisite Dew Falls On Our Heart And Then Vanishes. But The Freshness Lingers, And This, Always, Is What The Heart Needs. The Earth Must Have Risen In Just Such A Light The Morning The World Was Born.

A Fate Is Not A Punishment.

Idleness Is Fatal Only To The Mediocre.

Since We're All Going To Die, It's Obvious That When And How Don't Matter.

The Act Of Love Is A Confession.

Seeking What Is True Is Not Seeking What Is Desirable.

Having Money Is A Way Of Being Free Of Money.

If We Understood The Enigmas Of Life There Would Be No Need For Art.

The True Work Of Art Is Always On The Human Scale. It Is Essentially The One That Says, 'less.

It Is Immoral Not To Tell.

Happiness Is Generous. It Does Not Subsist On Destruction.

We Have Art In Order Not To Die Of Life.

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.

History Has Shown That The Less People Read, The More Books They Buy.

In Fact, It Comes To This: Nobody Is Capable Of Really Thinking About Anyone, Even In The Worst Calamity. For Really To Think About Someone Means Thinking About That Person Every Minute Of The Day, Without Letting One’s Thoughts Be Diverted By Anything- By Meals, By A Fly That Settles On One’s Cheek, By Household Duties, Or By A Sudden Itch Somewhere. But There Are Always Flies And Itches. That’s Why Life Is Difficult To Live.

To Me, Art Is Not A Solitary Delight. It Is A Means Of Stirring The Greatest Number Of Men By Providing Them With A Privileged Image Of Our Common Joys And Woes.

We Always Deceive Ourselves Twice About The People We Love - First To Their Advantage, Then To Their Disadvantage.

There Is Not A Single True Work Of Art That Has Not In The End Added To The Inner Freedom Insight And Life Of Each Person Who Has Known And Loved It.

I Would Rather Not Have Upset Him, But I Couldn't See Any Reason To Change My Life. Looking Back On It, I Wasn't Unhappy. When I Was A Student, I Had Lots Of Ambitions Like That. But When I Had To Give Up My Studies I Learned Very Quickly That None Of It Really Mattered.

Germany Collapsed As A Result Of Having Engaged In A Struggle For Empire With The Concepts Of Provincial Politics.

You Will Never Be Able To Experience Everything. So, Please, Do Poetical Justice To Your Soul And Simply Experience Yourself.

Experience Yourself

Artistic Creation Is A Demand For Unity And A Rejection Of The World.

Artistic Creation

One Cannot Be A Part-time Nihilist.

Life Is Meaningless, But Worth Living, Provided You Recognize It's Meaningless.

I Felt As Though I Was Partly Unlearning What I Had Never Learned And Yet Knew So Well: I Mean, How To Live.

In Order To Exist, Man Must Rebel.

But Sometimes It Takes More Courage To Live Than To Shoot Yourself.

I Shall Not, As Far As I Am Concerned, Try To Pass Myself Off As A Christian In Your Presence. I Share With You The Same Revulsion From Evil. But I Do Not Share Your Hope, And I Continue To Struggle Against This Universe In Which Children Suffer And Die.

Absolute Virtue Is Impossible And The Republic Of Forgiveness Leads, With Implacable Logic, To The Republic Of The Guillotine.

The Work Of Art Is Born Of The Intelligence's Refusal To Reason The Concrete. It Marks The Triumph Of The Carnal.

I Opened Myself To The Gentle Indifference Of The World.

If Pimps And Thieves Everywhere Were Always Punished, Honest People Would All Believe Themselves Always To Be Innocent.

Those Who Weep For The Happy Periods Which They Encounter In History Acknowledge What They Want; Not The Alleviation But The Silencing Of Misery.

In Our Society, Any Man Who Doesn't Cry At His Mother's Funeral Is Liable To Be Condemned To Death.

In Order To Understand The World, One Has To Turn Away From It On Occasion; In Order To Serve Others Better, One Has To Hold Them At A Distance For A Time. But Where Can One Find The Solitude Necessary To Vigor, The Deep Breath In Which The Mind Collects Itself And Courage Gauges Its Strength? There Remain Big Cities.

But The World Itself Has No Reason, And I Can Say So, I Who Have Experienced It All, From The Creation To The Destruction.

You Make The Mistake Of Thinking You Have To Choose, That You Have To Do What You Want, That There Are Conditions For Happiness. What Matters — All That Matters, Really Is The Will To Happiness, A Kind Of Enormous, Ever Present Consciousness. The Rest - Women , Art, Success — Is Nothing But Excuses. A Canvas Waiting For Our Embroideries.

A Nihilist Is Not One Who Believes In Nothing , But One Who Does Not Believe In What Exists.

I Do Not Believe In God And I Am Not An Atheist.

Women Are All We Know Of Paradise On This Earth.

Most Men Are Like Me. They Cannot Live In A Universe Where The Most Bizarre Thought Can In One Second Enter Into The Realm Of Reality--where, Most Often, It Does Enter, Like A Knife In A Heart.

It Is Better To Burn Than To Disappear.

The Loss Of Love Is The Loss Of All Rights, Even Though One Had Them All.

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.

Marxism Is Not Scientific: At The Best, It Has Scientific Prejudices.

There Is Always A Certain Hour Of The Day And Of The Night When A Man’s Courage Is At Its Lowest Ebb, And It Was That Hour Only That He Feared.

There Is The Good And The Bad, The Great And The Low, The Just And The Unjust. I Swear To You That All That Will Never Change.

My Chief Occupation, Despite Appearances, Has Always Been Love.

Note, Besides, That It Is No More Immoral To Directly Rob Citizens Than To Slip Indirect Taxes Into The Price Of Goods That They Cannot Do Without.

Every Time I Hear A Political Speech Or I Read Those Of Our Leaders, I Am Horrified At Having, For Years, Heard Nothing Which Sounded Human. It Is Always The Same Words Telling The Same Lies. And The Fact That Men Accept This, That The People’s Anger Has Not Destroyed These Hollow Clowns, Strikes Me As Proof That Men Attribute No Importance To The Way They Are Governed; That They Gamble – Yes, Gamble – With A Whole Part Of Their Life And Their So Called 'vital Interests.

To Correct A Natural Indifference I Was Placed Half-way Between Misery And The Sun. Misery Kept Me From Believing That All Was Well Under The Sun, And The Sun Taught Me That History Wasn't Everything.

Truth, Like Light, Blinds. Falsehood, On The Contrary, Is A Beautiful Twilight That Enhances Every Object.

Old Married People Look So Much Alike That They Have The Same Number Of Hairs In Their Ears.

The Absurd Is Lucid Reason Noting Its Limits.

We All Carry Within Us Places Of Exile, Our Crimes, Our Ravages. Our Task Is Not To Unleash Them On The World; It Is To Transform Them In Ourselves And Others.

Imagination Offers People Consolation For What They Cannot Be, And Humor For What They Actually Are.

He Was Expressing His Certainty That My Appeal Would Be Granted, But I Was Carrying The Burden Of A Sin From Which I Had To Free Myself. According To Him, Human Justice Was Nothing And Divine Justice Was Everything. I Pointed Out It Was The Former That Had Condemned Me.

There Is So Much Stubborn Hope In The Human Heart.

When One Has No Character, One Has To Apply A Method. Here It Did Wonders Incontrovertibly, And I Am Living On The Site Of One Of The Greatest Crimes In Human History.

I Make Myself Strict Rules In Order To Correct My Nature. But It Is My Nature That I Finally Obey.

The Role Of The Intellectual Cannot Be To Excuse The Violence Of One Side And Condemn That Of The Other.

The Laws Of Nature May Be Operative Up To A Certain Limit, Beyond Which They Turn Against Themselves To Give Birth To The Absurd.

Beginning To Think Is Beginning To Be Undermined.

We Get Into The Habit Of Living Before Acquiring The Habit Of Thinking.

In Order To Speak About All And To All, One Has To Speak Of What All Know And Of The Reality Common To Us All. The Sea, Rains, Necessity, Desire, The Struggle Against Death... These Are Things That Unite Us All.

I Don’t Know Whether This World Has A Meaning That Transcends It. But I Know That I Cannot Know That Meaning And That It Is Impossible For Me Just Now To Know It.

All Healthy Men Have Thought Of Their Own Suicide

Beware Of Those Who Say: "i Know This Too Well To Be Able To Express It." For If They Cannot Do So, This Is Because They Don't Know It Or Because Out Of Laziness They Stopped At The Outer Crust.

Freedom Is Not Constituted Primarily Of Privileges But Of Responsibilities.

We Call First Truths Those We Discover After All The Others.

If One Could Only Say Just Once: 'this Is Clear', All Would Be Saved

Freedom Is Not A Reward Or A Decoration That Is Celebrated With Champagne...oh No! It's A...long Distance Race, Quite Solitary And Very Exhausting.

Even When One Sits In The Prisoner's Dock, It Is Interesting To Hear Talk About Oneself.

Real Generosity Toward The Future Lies In Giving All To The Present.

Analysis Of Rebellion Leads At Least To The Suspicion That, Contrary To The Postulates Of Contemporary Thought, A Human Nature Does Exist, As The Greeks Believed. Why Rebel If There Is Nothing Permanent In Oneself Worth Preserving? ... Rebellion, Though Apparently Negative, Since It Creates Nothing, Is Profoundly Positive In That It Reveals The Part Of Man Which Must Always Be Defended.

The First Choice An Artist Makes Is Precisely To Be An Artist, And If He Chooses To Be An Artist It Is In Consideration Of What He Is Himself And Because Of A Certain Idea He Has Of Art

Have You Noticed That Only Death Arouses Our Emotions? How We Love Thee Friends Who Have Just Passed Away, Right? How We Admire Those Master Who No Longer Speak, Their Mouths Full Of Dirt. We Them We Are Not Obligated.

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.

That's Love, Giving Everything, Sacrificing All Without Hope Of Return.

I Am Not Made For Politics Because I Am Incapable Of Wanting Or Accepting The Death Of The Adversary.

It Is Natural To Give A Clear View Of The World After Accepting The Idea That It Must Be Clear.

Art And Revolt Will Die Only With The Last Man.

In This Vast Country That He Had So Loved, He Was Alone.

I Was Assailed By Memories Of A Life That Wasn't Mine Anymore, But One In Which I'd Found The Simplest And Most Lasting Joys.

An Intellectual? Yes. And Never Deny It. An Intellectual Is Someone Whose Mind Watches Itself. I Like This, Because I Am Happy To Be Both Halves, The Watcher And The Watched. "can They Be Brought Together?" This Is A Practical Question. We Must Get Down To It. "i Despise Intelligence" Really Means: "i Cannot Bear My Doubts.

We All Have A Weakness For Beauty.

Virtue Cannot Separate Itself From Reality Without Becoming A Principle Of Evil.

In Fact, Other People Create For Lack Of Power. I, On The Other Hand, Do Not Need A Work: I Live.

Trending Author

Mary Todd Lincoln

Category