Background Image

...

He Had Been Bored, That's All, Bored Like Most People. Hence He Had Made Himself Out Of Whole Cloth A Life Full Of Complications And Drama. Something Must Happen - And That Explains Most Human Commitments. Something Must Happen, Even Loveless Slavery, Even War Or Death. Hurray Then For Funerals!

-Albert Camus

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

He Had Been Bored,

Albert Camus

...

He Had Been Bored, That's All, Bored Like Most People. Hence He Had Made Himself Out Of Whole Cloth A Life Full Of Complications And Drama. Something Must Happen - And That Explains Most Human Commitments. Something Must Happen, Even Loveless Slavery, Even War Or Death. Hurray Then For Funerals!

Views: 5

Topic

More From Albert Camus

And 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.

... One Cannot Be Happy In Exile Or In Oblivion. One Cannot Always Be A Stranger. I Want To Return To My Homeland, Make All My Loved Ones Happy. I See No Further Than This.

The Absurd Is A Shadow Cast Over Everything We Do And Even If We Try To Live Life As If It Has Meaning As If There Are Reasons For Doing Things The Absurd Will Linger In The Back Of Our Minds As A Nagging Doubt That Perhaps There Is No Point.

But Again And Again There Comes A Time In History When The Man Who Dares To Say That Two And Two Make Four Is Punished With Death. The Schoolteacher Is Well Aware Of This. And The Question Is Not One Of Knowing What Punishment Or Reward Attends The Making Of This Calculation. The Question Is One Of Knowing Whether Two And Two Do Make Four

The Only Deep Emotion I Occasionally Felt In These Affairs Was Gratitude, When All Was Going Well And I Was Left, Not Only Peace, But Freedom To Come And Go--never Kinder And Gayer With One Woman Than When I Had Just Left Another's Bed, As If I Extended To All Others The Debt I Had Just Contracted Toward One Of Them.

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

Too Many Have Dispensed With Generosity In Order To Practice Charity.

The Best Revenge You Can Have On Intellectuals Is To Be Madly Happy.

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.

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

After All Perhaps The Greatness Of Art Lies In The Perpetual Tension Between Beauty And Pain, The Love Of Men And The Madness Of Creation, Unbearable Solitude And The Exhausting Crowd, Rejection And Consent.

My Great Idea Is That We Must Forgive The Pope. First Of All, He Needs It More Than Anyone Else. Besides, It Is The Only Way Of Placing Oneself Above Him.

The Truth Is That Every Intelligent Man, As You Know, Dreams Of Being A Gangster And Of Ruling Over Society By Force Alone. As It Is Not So Easy As The Detective Novels Might Lead One To Believe, One Generally Relies On Politics And Joins The Cruelest Party.what Does It Matter, After All, If By Humiliating One's Mind One Succeeds In Dominating Every One? I Discovered In Myself Sweet Dreams Of Oppression.

For 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.

You Know, [women] Do Not Really Condemn Any Weakness: Rather, They Try To Humiliate Or Disarm Our Strengths. That Is Why Women Arethe Reward, Not Of The Warrior, But Of The Criminal.

If Something Is Going To Happen To Me, I Want To Be There.

God Is Not Necessary To Create Culpability, Or To Punish. Our Fellow Men Are Enough For That, Helped By Ourselves.

We Are Not So Mad As To Think That We Shall Create A World In Which Murder Will Not Occur. We Are Fighting For A World In Which Murder Will No Longer Be Legal.

But What Is Happiness Except The Simple Harmony Between A Man And The Life He Leads?

The French Revolution Gave Birth To No Artists But Only To A Great Journalist, Desmoulins, And To An Under-the-counter Writer, Sade. The Only Poet Of The Times Was The Guillotine.

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

The Real 19th Century Prophet Was Dostoevsky, Not Karl Marx.

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

The Day Of My Arrest I Was First Put In A Room Where There Were Already Several Other Prisoners, Most Of Them Arabs. They Laughed When They Saw Me. Then They Asked What I Was In For. I Said I'd Killed An Arab And They Were All Silent

There Are Some Individuals Who Have Too Strong A Craving, A Will, And A Nostalgia For Happiness Ever To Reach It. They Always Retain A Bitter And Passionate Aftertaste, And That's The Best They Can Hope For.

It Is Immoral Not To Tell.

Happiness Implied A Choice, And Within That Choice A Concerted Will, A Lucid Desire.

There Are Means That Cannot Be Excused. And I Should Like To Be Able To Love My Country And Still Love Justice. I Don't Want Just Any Greatness For It, Particularly A Greatness Born Of Blood And Falsehood. I Want To Keep It Alive By Keeping Justice Alive.

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.

The Nobility Of Our Calling Will Always Be Rooted In Two Commitments Difficult To Observe: Refusal To Lie About What We Know, And Resistance To Oppression.

But 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 Seas, Rains, Necessity, Desire, The Struggle Against Death--these Are Things That Unite Us All. We Resemble One Another In What We See Together, In What We Suffer Together. Dreams Change From Individual, But The Reality Of The World Is Common To Us All. Striving Towards Realism Is Therefore Legitimate, For It Is Basically Related To The Artistic Adventure.

Only It Takes Time To Be Happy. A Lot Of Time. Happiness, Too, Is A Long Patience.

I Have The Loftiest Idea, And The Most Passionate One, Of Art. Much Too Lofty To Agree To Subject It To Anything. Much Too Passionate To Want To Divorce It From Anything.

There Is A Terrible Emptiness In Me, An Indifference That Hurts.

To Lose One's Life Is No Great Matter; When The Time Comes I'll Have The Courage To Lose Mine. But What's Intolerable Is To See One's Life Being Drained Of Meaning, To Be Told There's No Reason For Existing. A Man Can't Live Without Some Reason For Living.

Human Rebellion Ends In Metaphysical Revolution. It Progresses From Appearances To Acts, From The Dandy To The Revolutionary.

Thinking Of The Future, Establishing Aims For Oneself, Having Preferences-all This Presupposes A Belief In Freedom, Even If One Occasionally Ascertains That One Doesn't Feel It.

After A Short Silence The Doctor Raised Himself A Little In His Chair And Asked If Tarrou Had An Idea Of The Path To Follow For Attaining Peace. "yes, He Replied. "the Path Of Sympathy.

In Order To Exist, Man Must Rebel.

Nothing In Life Is Worth, Turning Your Back On, If You Love It.

Turning Your Back

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

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.

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.

Ah, Mon Cher, For Anyone Who Is Alone, Without God And Without A Master, The Weight Of Days Is Dreadful.

His Own Faith, However, Was Not Lacking In Virtues Since It Consisted In Acknowledging Obscurely That He Would Be Granted Much Without Ever Deserving Anything.

There Is No More Futile Punishment Than Futile And Hopeless Labor.

The Desire For Possession Is Insatiable, To Such A Point That It Can Survive Even Love Itself. To Love, Therefore, Is To Sterilize The Person One Loves.

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.

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

The Main Thing Is That Everything Become Simple, Easy Enough For A Child To Understand.

In 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.

Liberty Is Dangerous, As Hard To Get Along With As It Is Exciting.

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

People Hasten To Judge In Order Not To Be Judged Themselves.

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.

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.

Powerful, Yes, That Is The Word That I Constantly Rolled On My Tongue, I Dreamed Of Absolute Power, The Kind That Forces Others Tokneel, That Forces The Enemy To Capitulate, Finally Converting Him, And The More The Enemy Is Blind, Cruel, Sure Of Himself, Buried In His Conviction, The More His Admission Proclaims The Royalty Of He Who Has Brought On His Defeat.

I Draw From The Absurd Three Consequences: My Revolt, My Liberty, My Passion.

I Am Just Coming Out Of Five Years Of Night, And This Orgy Of Violent Lights Gives Me For The First Time The Impression Of A New Continent. An Enormous, 50-foot High Camel Billboard : A Gi With His Mouth Wide Open Blows Enormous Puffs Of Real Smoke. So Much Bad Taste Hardly Seems Imaginable.

The More I Accuse Myself, The More Right I Have To Judge You. Even Better, I Make You Judge Yourself, Which Comforts Me The More.

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

When There Is No Hope, One Must Invent Hope.

We All Have A Weakness For Beauty.

Outside Of That Single Fatality Of Death, Everything, Joy Or Happiness, Is Liberty.

The Only Real Progress Lies In Learning To Be Wrong All Alone.

The Realization That Life Is Absurd And Cannot Be An End, But Only A Beginning. This Is A Truth Nearly All Great Minds Have Taken As Their Starting Point. It Is Not This Discovery That Is Interesting, But Theconsequences And Rules Of Action Drawn From It.

No Doubt Our Love Was Still There, But Quite Simply It Was Unusable, Heavy To Carry, Inert Inside Of Us, Sterile As Crime Or Condemnation. It Was No Longer Anything Except A Patience With No Future And A Stubborn Wait.

It Is In The Thick Of Calamity That One Gets Hardened To The Truth - In Other Words, To Silence.

Rule: Start By Looking For What Is Valid In Every Man.

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

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

In The Past, The Poverty They Shared Had A Certain Sweetness About It. When The End Of The Day Came And They Would Eat Their Dinner In Silence With The Oil Lamp Between Them, There Was A Secret Joy In Such Simplicity, Such Retrenchment.

It Is Not True That The Heart Wears Out - But The Body Creates This Illusion.

Maman Died Today. Or Yesterday Maybe, I Don't Know. I Got A Telegram From The Home: 'mother Deceased. Funeral Tomorrow. Faithfully Yours.' That Doesn't Mean Anything. Maybe It Was Yesterday.

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

A Craving For Freedom And Independence Is Generated Only In A Man Still Living On Hope.

When You Have Once Seen The Glow Of Happiness On The Face Of A Beloved Person, You Know That A Man Can Have No Vocation But To Awaken That Light On The Faces Surrounding Him. In The Depth Of Winter, I Finally Learned That Within Me There Lay An Invincible Summer.

You Always Get Exaggerated Notions Of Things You Don't Know Anything About.

If The Only Significant History Of Human Thought Were To Be Written, It Would Have To Be The History Of Its Successive Regrets And Its Impotences.

Myth Of Sisyphus

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

I Longed To Be Forgotten In Order To Be Able To Complain To Myself.

I Want To Know If I Can Live With What I Know, And Only Than.

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.

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

I Have Not Stopped Loving That Which Is Sacred In This World.

Happiness And Love

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.

As For Hitler, His Professed Religion Unhesitatingly Juxtaposed The God-providence And Valhalla. Actually His God Was An Argument At A Political Meeting And A Manner Of Reaching An Impressive Climax At The End Of Speeches.

One Plays At Being Immortal And After A Few Weeks One Doesn't Even Know Whether Or Not One Can Hang On Till The Next Day.

There Are Crimes Of Passion And Crimes Of Logic. The Boundary Between Them Is Not Clearly Defined.

To Be Happy, We Must Not Be Too Concerned With Others.

And Often He Who Has Chosen The Fate Of The Artist Because He Felt Himself To Be Different Soon Realizes That He Can Maintain Neither His Art Nor His Difference Unless He Admits That He Is Like The Others. The Artist Forges Himself To The Others, Midway Between The Beauty He Cannot Do Without And The Community He Cannot Tear Himself Away From.

Yes, And When The Love Of Life Disappears, No Meaning Can Console Us.

Your Successes And Happiness Are Forgiven You Only If You Generously Consent To Share Them.

I Felt That I Had Been Happy And That I Was Happy Again. For Everything To Be Consummated, For Me To Feel Less Alone, I Had Only To Wish That There Be A Large Crowd Of Spectators The Day Of My Execution And That They Greet Me With Cries Of Hate.

The Mind's Deepest Desire, Even In Its Most Elaborate Operations, Parallels Man's Unconscious Feeling In The Face Of His Universe: It Is An Insistence Upon Familiarity, An Appetite For Clarity.

What Is Human In Me Is Not What Is Best In Me. What Is Human In Me Is That I Desire, And To Obtain What I Desire, I Believe I Would Crush Anything That Stood In My Way.

What I Believe To Be True I Must Therefore Preserve. What Seems To Me So Obvious, Even Against Me, I Must Support.

We Are Not Certain, We Are Never Certain.

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.

The Only Way To Deal With An Unfree World Is To Become So Absolutely Free That Your Very Existence Is An Act Of Rebellion.

When The Throne Of God Is Overturned, The Rebel Realizes That It Is Now His Own Responsibility To Create The Justice, Order, And Unity That He Sought In Vain Within His Own Condition, And In This Way To Justify The Fall Of God. Then Begins The Desperate Effort To Create, At The Price Of Crime And Murder If Necessary, The Dominion Of Man.

Man Cannot Do Without Beauty, And This Is What Our Era Pretends To Want To Disregard.

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

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.

To Remain A Man In Today's World, One Must Have Not Only Unfailing Energy And Unwavering Intensity, One Must Also Have A Little Luck.

Somebody Has To Have The Last Word. If Not, Every Argument Could Be Opposed By Another And We'd Never Be Done With It.

You Will Never Be Happy If You Continue To Search For What Happiness Consists Of. You Will Never Live If You Are Looking For The Meaning Of Life.

Every Writer, Big Or Small, Needs To Say Or Write That The Genius Is Always Hissed At By His Contemporaries. Naturally, This Is Not True, It Happens Only Occasionally And Often By Chance. But This Need Within The Writer Is Enlightening.

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

Where Would His Torture Be, Indeed, If At Every Step The Hope Of Succeeding Upheld Him?

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.

Maybe She Had Become Tired Of Being The Girlfriend Of A Condemned Man. It Also Occured To Me That Maybe She Was Sick, Or Dead. These Things Happen. [...] Anyway, After That, Remembering Marie Meant Nothing To Me. That Seemed Perfectly Normal To Me, Since I Understood Very Well That People Would Forget Me When I Was Dead.

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.

A Work Of Art Is A Confession.

Time Will Prolong Time, And Life Will Serve Life. In This Field That Is Both Limited And Bulging With Possibilities, Everything To Himself, Except His Lucidity, Seems Unforeseeable To Him. What Rule, Then, Could Emanate From That Unreasonable Order? The Only Truth That Might Seem Instructive To Him Is Not Formal: It Comes To Life And Unfolds In Men. The Absurd Mind Cannot So Much Expect Ethical Rules At The End Of Its Reasoning As, Rather, Illustrations And The Breath Of Human Lives.

Absurd- That Is The Light Mind That Establishes Its Own Borders.

For The Existentials, Negation Is Their God. To Be Precise, That God Is Maintained Only Through The Negation Of Human Reason. But, Like Suicides, Gods Change With Men.

What’s True Of All The Evils In The World Is True Of Plague As Well. It Helps Men To Rise Above Themselves.

Charm Is A Way Of Getting The Answer 'yes' Without Asking A Clear Question.

It Should Be Pointed Out For Our Own Guidance In The West That The Continual Signing Of Manifestoes And Protests Is One Of The Surest Ways Of Undermining The Efficacy And Dignity Of The Intellectual. There Exists A Permanent Blackmail That We All Know And That We Must Have The Often Solitary Courage To Resist.

Ah! My Friend, For Whomever Is Alone, Without A God And Without A Master, The Weight Of Time Is Terrible. One Must Then Choose A Master, God Being Out Of Style.

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

A Man Who Has Become Conscious Of The Absurd Is For Ever Bound To It.

By Giving Too Much Importance To Fine Actions One May End By Paying An Indirect But Powerful Tribute To Evil, Because In So Doing One Implies That Such Fine Actions Are Only Valuable Because They Are Rare, And That Malice Or Indifference Are Far More Common Motives In The Actions Of Men.

Il Y A Dans Les Hommes Plus De Choses A' Admirer Que De Choses A' Me Priser. There Are More Things To Admire In People Than To Despise.

Morality, When Formal, Devours.

He'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.

Realism Should Only Be The Means Of Expression Of Religious Genius... Or, At The Other Extreme, The Artistic Expressions Of Monkeys Which Are Quite Satisfied With Mere Imitation. In Fact, Art Is Never Realistic Though Sometimes It Is Tempted To Be. To Be Really Realistic A Description Would Have To Be Endless.

Metaphysical Rebellion Is A Claim, Motivated By The Concept Of A Complete Unity, Against The Suffering Of Life And Death And A Protest Against The Human Condition Both For Its Incompleteness, Thanks To Death, And Its Wastefulness, Thanks To Evil.

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

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.

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.

Conscious Of Not Being Able To Separate Myself From My Time, I Have Decided To Become Part Of It.

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.

True Artists Scorn Nothing.

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 Revolutionary Government Was Required To Become The Government Of The War.

Madness Such As This, Its Like Trying To Stop A Fire With The Moisture From A Kiss

“to Think The Way You Do,” He Said Smiling, “you Have To Be A Man Who Lives Either On A Tremendous Despair, Or On A Tremendous Hope.” “on Both, Perhaps.”

Basically, At The Very Bottom Of Life, Which Seduces Us All, There Is Only Absurdity, And More Absurdity. And Maybe That's What Gives Us Our Joy For Living, Because The Only Thing That Can Defeat Absurdity Is Lucidity.

Truly Fertile Music, The Only Kind That Will Move Us, That We Shall Truly Appreciate, Will Be A Music Conducive To Dream, Which Banishes All Reason And Analysis. One Must Not Wish First To Understand And Then To Feel. Art Does Not Tolerate Reason.

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

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

Rebellion Cannot Exist Without The Feeling That Somewhere, In Some Way, You Are Justified.

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

The Myth Of Unlimited Production Brings War In Its Train As Inevitably As Clouds Announce A Storm.

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?

The Soul Of A Murderer Is Blind

To Create Today Is To Create Dangerously. Any Publication Is An Act, And That Act Exposes One To The Passions Of An Age That Forgives Nothing.

If Only Nature Is Real And If, In Nature, Only Desire And Destruction Are Legitimate, Then, In That All Humanity Does Not Suffice To Assuage The Thirst For Blood, The Path Of Destruction Must Lead To Universal Annihilation.

Nihilism Is Not Only Despair And Negation, But Above All The Desire To Despair And To Negate.

Je Puis Nier Une Chose Sans Me Croire Obligé De La Salir Ou De Retirer Aux Autres Le Droit D'y Croire.

But All The Long Speeches, All The Interminable Days And Hours That People Had Spent Talking About My Soul, Had Left Me With The Impression Of A Colorless Swirling River That Was Making Me Dizzy.

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

Do You Believe In God, Doctor?" No - But What Does That Really Mean? I'm Fumbling In The Dark, Struggling To Make Something Out. But I've Long Ceased Finding That Original.

I Had Only A Little Time Left And I Didn't Want To Waste It On God.

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

People Have Played On Words And Pretended To Believe That Refusing To Grant A Meaning To Life Necessarily Leads To Declaring That It Is Not Worth Living. In Truth, There Is No Necessary Common Measure Between These Two Judgments.

I Said That The World Is Absurd, But I Was Too Hasty. This World In Itself Is Not Reasonable, That Is All That Can Be Said. But What Is Absurd Is The Confrontation Of This Irrational And The Wild Longing For Clarity Whose Call Echoes In The Human Heart.

Absurdity Of Life

Friendship Is Not So Simple. It Is Hard To Get And Takes A Long Time, But When One Ha It One Cannot Get Rid Of It, One Has To Face It.

Purely Historical Thought Is Therefore Nihilistic: It Wholeheartedly Accepts The Evil Of History And In This Way Is Opposed To Rebellion.

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.

When I Was Young, I Expected From People More Than They Could Give: Neverending Friendship And Constant Excitement. Now I Expect Less Than They Can Actually Can Give: To Stay Close Silently. And Their Feelings, Friendship, Noble Deeds Always Seem Like A Miracle To Me: A True Grace.

In A World That Has Ceased To Believe In Sin, The Artist Is Responsible For The Preaching.

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

The First Progressive Step For A Mind Overwhelmed By The Strangeness Of Things Is To Realize That This Feeling Of Strangeness Is Shared With All Men And That Human Reality, In Its Entirety, Suffers From The Distance Which Separates It From The Rest Of The Universe.

...any Authentic Creation Is A Gift To The Future.

Every Great Work Makes The Human Face More Admirable And Richer, And This Is Its Whole Secret.

The Contradiction Is This: Man Rejects The World As It Is, Without Accepting The Necessity Of Escaping It. In Fact, Men Cling To The World And By Far The Majority Do Not Want To Abandon It.

I Know Myself Too Well To Believe In Pure Virtue.

By Definition, A Government Has No Conscience. Sometimes It Has A Policy, But Nothing More.

At That Moment He Knew What His Mother Was Thinking, And That She Loved Him. But He Knew, Too, That To Love Someone Means Relatively Little; Or, Rather, That Love Is Never Strong Enough To Find The Words Befitting It. Thus He And His Mother Would Always Love Each Other Silently. And One Day She--or He--would Die, Without Ever, All Their Lives Long, Having Gone Farther Than This By Way Of Making Their Affection Known.

Beauty, No Doubt, Does Not Make Revolutions. But A Day Will Come When Revolutions Will Have Need Of Beauty.

The Poor Man Whom Everyone Speaks Of, The Poor Man Whom Everyone Pities, One Of The Repulsive Poor From Whom Charitable Souls Keep Their Distance, He Has Still Said Nothing. Or, Rather, He Has Spoken Through The Voice Of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At Least, They Said So. And These Shameful Impostures Fed Their Authors. Cruel Irony, The Poor Man Tormented With Hunger Feeds Those Who Plead His Case.

The Sense Of Doing Good , The Satisfaction Of Being Right, The Joy Of Looking Favorably Upon Oneself, Dear Sir, Are Powerful Levers For Keeping Us Upright And Making Us Progress. On The Other Hand, If Men Are Deprived Of That Feeling, They Are Changed Into Rabid Dogs.

Cruel Irony, The Poor Man Tormented With Hunger Feeds Those Who Plead His Case.

The One Who Doesnt Play, Doesnt Win Anything, But He Actually Looses Somehting, {playing}

For Who Would Dare To Assert That Eternal Happiness Can Compensate For A Single Moment's Human Suffering

Eternal Happiness

There Will Be No Lasting Peace Either In The Heart Of Individuals Or In Social Customs Until Death Is Outlawed.

When I Was Young I Asked More Of People Than They Could Give: Everlasting Friendship, Endless Feeling. Now I Know To Ask Less Of Them Than They Can Give: A Straightforward Companionship. And Their Feelings, Their Friendship, Their Generous Actions Seem In My Eyes To Be Wholly Miraculous: A Consequence Of Grace Alone.

To Begin With, Poor People´s Memory Is Less Nourished Than That Of A Rich; It Has Fewer Landmarks In Space Because They Seldom Leave The Place Where They Live, And Fewer Reference Points In Time Throughtout Lives That Are Grey And Featureless.

Why Should It Be Essential To Love Rarely In Order To Love Much?

My Life Was Lucky So That I Met, I Loved (and Disappointed) Only Outstanding People.

Thus, I Always Began By Assuming The Worst; My Appeal Was Dismissed. That Meant, Of Course, I Was To Die. Sooner Than Others, Obviously. 'but,' I Reminded Myself, 'it's Common Knowledge That Life Isn't Worth Living, Anyhow.' And, On A Wide View, I Could See That It Makes Little Difference Whether One Dies At The Age Of Thirty Or Threescore And Ten-- Since, In Either Case, Other Men Will Continue Living, The World Will Go On As Before. Also, Whether I Died Now Or Forty Years Hence, This Business Of Dying Had To Be Got Through, Inevitably.

Every Revolutionary Ends Up Either By Becoming An Oppressor Or A Heretic.

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

The Realization That Life Is Absurd Cannot Be An End, But Only A Beginning.

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.

The Act Of Love Is A Confession.

An Intense Feeling Carries With It Its Own Universe, Magnificent Or Wretched As The Case May Be.

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.

The Innocent Is The Person Who Explains Nothing

It Is Easier To Kill What We Do Not Know.

Life Is A Sum Of All Your Choices". So, What Are You Doing Today?

Decisions You Make

I Had The Whole Sky In My Eyes And It Was Blue And Gold.

I've Never Really Had Much Of An Imagination. But Still I Would Try To Picture The Exact Moment When The Beating Of My Heart Would No Longer Be Going On Inside My Head.

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.

Give Up The Tyranny Of Female Charm.

A Loveless World Is A Dead World.

What Doesn't Kill You Make You Stronger And Stronger

Makes You Stronger

Trending Author

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Category