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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

-Albert Camus

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The Day Of My

Albert Camus

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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

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Some Are Created To Love, While The Others - To Live.

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In Art, Rebellion Is Consummated And Perpetuated In The Act Of Real Creation, Not In Criticism Or Commentary.

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.

He Knew Now That It Was His Own Will To Happiness Which Must Make The Next Move. But If He Was To Do So, He Realized That He Must Come To Terms With Time, That To Have Time Was At Once The Most Magnificent And The Most Dangerous Of Experiments. Idleness Is Fatal Only To The Mediocre.

The Future Is The Only Transcendental Value For Men Without God.

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A Stranger To Myself And To The World, Armed Solely With A Thought That Negates Itself As Soon As It Asserts, What Is This Condition In Which I Can Have Peace Only By Refusing To Know And To Live, In Which The Appetite For Conquest Bumps Into Walls That Defy Its Assaults?

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Mostly, I Could Tell, I Made Him Feel Uncomfortable. He Didn't Understand Me, And He Was Sort Of Holding It Against Me. I Felt The Urge To Reassure Him That I Was Like Everybody Else, Just Like Everybody Else. But Really There Wasn't Much Point, And I Gave Up The Idea Out Of Laziness.

The Absurd Is The Essential Concept And The First Truth.

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

For Me, Physical Love Has Always Been Bound To An Irresistible Feeling Of Innocence And Joy. Thus, I Cannot Love In Tears But In Exaltation.

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

The Innocent Is The Person Who Explains Nothing

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

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.

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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.

I Know Myself Too Well To Believe In Pure Virtue.

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.

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Lying Is Not Only Saying What Isn't True. It Is Also, In Fact Especially, Saying More Than Is True And, In The Case Of The Human Heart, Saying More Than One Feels. We All Do It, Every Day, To Make Life Simpler.

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When There Is No Hope, One Must Invent Hope.

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Does The End Justify The Means? That Is Possible. But What Will Justify The End? To That Question, Which Historical Thought Leaves Pending, Rebellion Replies: The Means.

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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.

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Intelligence In Chains Loses In Lucidity What It Gains In Intensity.

And It Was Like Knocking Four Quick Times On The Door Of Unhappiness.

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

The Act Of Love Is A Confession.

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The Urge To Revolt Is One Of The Essential Dimensions Of Human Nature.

Great Ideas, It Has Been Said, Come Into The World As Gently As Doves. Perhaps Then, If We Listen Attentively, We Shall Hear Amid The Uproar Of Empires And Nations, A Faint Flutter Of Wings, The Gentle Stirring Of Life And Hope. Some Will Say That This Hope Lies In A Nation; Others In A Man. I Believe Rather That It Is Awakened, Revived, Nourished, By Millions Of Solitary Individuals Whose And Works Every Day Negate Frontiers And The Crudest Implications Of History.

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Life Has No Meaning

Mother Died Today. Or Maybe Yesterday; I Can't Be Sure.

Youth Is Above All A Collection Of Possibilities.

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

Freedom Is Not Constituted Primarily Of Privileges But Of Responsibilities.

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

What Really Counted Was The Possibility Of Escape, A Leap To Freedom, Out Of The Implacable Ritual, A Wild Run For It That Would Give Whatever Chance For Hope There Was. Of Course, Hope Meant Being Cut Down On Some Street Corner, As You Ran Like Mad, By A Random Bullet. But When I Really Thought It Through, Nothing Was Going To Allow Me Such A Luxury. Everything Was Against It; I Would Just Be Caught Up In The Machinery Again.

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.

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

La Ve Rite , Comme La Lumie' Re, Aveugle. Le Mensonge, Au Contraire, Est Un Beau Cre Puscule Qui Met Chaque Objet En Valeur. Truth, Like Light, Blinds. A Lie, On The Contrary, Is A Beautiful Twilight Which Shows The Value Of Each Object.

In Short, They Were Gambling On Their Luck, And Luck Is Not To Be Coerced.

Once One's Up Against It, The Precise Manner Of One's Death Has Obviously Small Importance.

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

To Be Born To Create, To Love, To Win At Games Is To Be Born To Live In Time Of Peace. But War Teaches Us To Lose Everything And Become What We Were Not. It All Becomes A Question Of Style.

To Understand One's World, One Must Sometimes Turn Away From It! To Serve Better, One Must Briefly Hold It At A Distance. Where Can The Necessary Solitude Be Found, The Long Breathing Space In Which Mind Gathers Its Strength And Takes Stock Of Its Courage.

Breathing Space

Every Ideology Is Contrary To Human Psychology.

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.

Nothing Can Discourage The Appetite For Divinity In The Heart Of Man.

It Is Immoral Not To Tell.

I Do Not Have Much Liking For The Too Famous Existential Philosophy, And, To Tell The Truth, I Think Its Conclusions False.

Telling The Truth

We Do Not Know How To Eliminate Evil, But We Do Know How To Feed Some Of The Hungry And Heal Some Of The Infirmed.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Should I Kill Myself, Or Have A Cup Of Coffee?

On Good Days, If You Trust Life, Life Has To Answer You.

Where There Is No Hope, We Must Invent It.

Yes, I Know What Passion Would Fill Me With All Its Power. Before, I Was Too Young. I Got In The Way. Now I Know That Acting And Loving And Suffering Is Living, Of Course, But It’s Only Living Insofar As You Can Be Transparent And Accept Your Fate, Like The Unique Reflection Of A Rainbow Of Joys And Passions Which Is The Same For Everyone.

Everybody Knows Life Isn't Worth Living.

We Must Learn How To Lend Ourselves To Dreaming When Dreams Lend Themselves To Us.

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.

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.

Men Are Never Really Willing To Die Except For The Sake Of Freedom: Therefore They Do Not Believe In Dying Completely.

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

There Is Always A Philosophy For Lack Of Courage.

True Artists Scorn Nothing.

The Aim Of Art, The Aim Of A Life Can Only Be To Increase The Sum Of Freedom And Responsibility To Be Found In Every Man And In The World. It Cannot, Under Any Circumstances, Be To Reduce Or Suppress That Freedom, Even Temporarily.

An Intellectual Is Someone Whose Mind Watches Itself.

Do Not Wait For The Last Judgment. It Takes Place Every Day.

A Writer Cannot Put Himself Today In Service Of Those Who Make History; He Is At The Service Of Those Who Suffer It.

People Believe A Man Is In Distress Because His Loved One Dies In One Day. But His Real Pain Is Less Futile: It Is That He Finds Out That Sadness Too Does Not Last. Even Pain Has No Meaning.

Because,' 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.

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

If, After All, Men Cannot Always Make History Have A Meaning, They Can Always Act So That Their Own Lives Have One.

Every Rebellion Implies Some Kind Of Unity.

There Is A Metaphysical Honour In Ending The World's Absurdity. Conquest Or Play-acting, Multiple Loves, Absurd Revolt Are Tributes That Man Pays To His Dignity In A Campaign In Which He Is Defeated In Advance.... War Cannot Be Negated. One Must Live It Or Die Of It. So It Is With The Absurd: It Is A Question Of Breathing With It, Of Recognizing Its Lessons And Recovering Their Flesh. In This Regard The Absurd Joy Par Excellence Is Creation. "art And Nothing But Art", Said Nietzsche, "we Have Art In Order Not To Die Of The Truth."

Truth, Like Light, Is Blinding. Lies, On The Other Hand, Are A Beautiful Dusk, Which Enhances The Value Of Each Object.

A Novel Is Never Anything But A Philosophy Expressed In Images. And In A Good Novel The Philosophy Has Disappeared Into The Images.

... 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.

Having Money Is A Way Of Being Free Of Money.

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

The Truth Is That Everyone Is Bored, And Devotes Himself To Cultivating Habits.

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

What Is A Rebel? A Man Who Says No.

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.

We Are Not Certain, We Are Never Certain. If We Were We Could Reach Some Conclusions, And We Could, At Last, Make Others Take Us Seriously.

Camus Himself Described This Work As 'an Attempt To Understand The Time I Live In'.

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.

I Hope The Dogs Don't Bark Tonight. I Always Think It's Mine

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.

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.

Old Women Even Forget How To Love Their Sons. The Heart Gets Worn Out, Monsieur.

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

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.

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.

I Lived With The Only Continuity, Day To Day, Of The Me-me-me.

The Ancients, Even Though They Believed In Destiny , Believed Primarily In Nature , In Which They Participated Wholeheartedly. To Rebel Against Nature Amounted To Rebelling Against Oneself. It Was Butting One's Head Against A Wall.

A Trial Cannot Be Conducted By Announcing The General Culpability Of A Civilization. Only The Actual Deeds Which, At Least, Stank In The Nostrils Of The Entire World Were Brought To Judgment.

No Longer Were There Individual Destinies; Only A Collective Destiny, Made Of Plague And Emotions Shared By All.

The Absurd Is Lucid Reason Noting Its Limits.

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

Whereas The Greeks Gave To Will The Boundaries Of Reason, We Have Come To Put The Will's Impulse In The Very Center Of Reason, Which Has, As A Result, Become Deadly.

In The Next Few Years The Struggle Will Not Be Between Utopia And Reality, But Between Different Utopias, Each Trying To Impose Itself On Reality ... We Can No Longer Hope To Save Everything, But ... We Can At Least Try To Save Lives, So That Some Kind Of Future, If Perhaps Not The Ideal One, Will Remain Possible.

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

When I Look At My Life And Its Secret Colors, I Feel Like Bursting Into Tears.

The Truth Is That Nothing Is Less Sensational Than Pestilence, And By Reason Of Their Very Duration Great Misfortunes Are Monotonous.

Humans Are Creatures, Who Spent Their Lifes Trying To Convince Themselves, That Their Existence Is Not Absurd

Freedom Is The Right To Never Have To Lie.

At Times I Feel Myself Overtaken By An Immense Tenderness For These People Around Me Who Live In The Same Century.

Happiness And Love

I Realized Then That A Man Who Had Lived Only One Day Could Easily Live For A Hundred Years In Prison. He Would Have Enough Memories To Keep Him From Being Bored

And 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.

False Judges Are Held Up In The World's Admiration And I Alone Know The True Ones.

In Order To Be Created, A Work Of Art Must First Make Use Of The Dark Forces Of The Soul

Fate Is Not In Man But Around Him

It Is Not Rebellion Itself Which Is Noble But The Demands It Makes Upon Us.

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.

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.

Beginning To Think Is Beginning To Be Undermined. Society Has But Little Connection With Such Beginnings. The Worm Is In Man's Heart. That Is Where It Must Be Sought. One Must Follow And Understand This Fatal Game That Leads From Lucidity In The Face Of Existence To Flight From Light.

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