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 was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.
Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening's slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.
Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.
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.
Mon cher ami, let's not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!!! Otherwise, we'll be left in shreds. We are forced to take the same precautions as the animal trainer. If, before going into the cage, he has the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild animals!!
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.
We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
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.
Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.
I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
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