Misattributed To Albert Camus Quotes

There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for. ~ Albert Dietrich

Soon after this incident the court rose. As I was being taken from the courthouse to the prison van, I was conscious for a few brief moments of the once familiar feel of a summer evening out-of-doors. And, sitting in the darkness of my moving cell, I recognized echoing in my tired brain, all the characteristic sounds of a town I'd loved, and of a certain hour of the day which I had always particularly enjoyed. The shouts of newspaper boys in the already languid air, the last calls of birds in the public garden, the cries of sandwich vendors, the screech of streetcars at the steep corners of the upper town, and that faint rustling overhead as darkness sifted down upon the harbor. All these sounds made my return to prison like a blind man's journey along a route whose every inch he knows by heart. ~ Albert Camus

Old women even forget how to love their sons. The heart gets worn out, Monsieur. ~ Albert Camus

What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others. However that may be, after prolonged research on
myself, I brought out the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to shine,
humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by peaceful means and eventually used to achieve, through disinterested means, everything
I desired. ~ Albert Camus

This work is an attempt to understand the time I live in. ~ Albert Camus

I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It's not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity.
Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy.
The miracle of not having to talk about oneself. ~ Albert Camus

Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. ( ... ) I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. ~ Albert Camus

The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death. ~ Albert Camus

Few indeed are those who continue to be openhanded after they have acquired the means for it. Such as these are princes among men, before whom one must bow down ~ Albert Camus

Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss ~ Albert Camus

This word "Absurd" has had an unhappy history and I confess that now it rather annoys me. When I analyzed the feeling of the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, I was looking for a method and not a doctrine. I was practicing methodical doubt. I was trying to make a "tabula rasa," on the basis of which it would then be possible to construct something. If we assume that nothing has any meaning, then we must conclude that the world is absurd. But does nothing have any meaning? I have never believed we could remain at this point. ~ Albert Camus

There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide," the text began. I winced. "Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories," it continued, "comes afterward"; such questions, the text explained, were part of the game humanity played, but they deserved attention only after the one true issue had been settled. The book was The Myth of Sisyphus and was written by the Algerian-born philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus. After a moment, the iciness of his words melted under the light of comprehension. Yes, of course, I thought. You can ponder this or analyze that till the cows come home, but the real question is whether all your ponderings and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to. Everything else is detail. ~ Brian Greene

Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there's always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her. ~ Albert Camus

There's a great Albert Camus quote: '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 I first re-emerged, I was embarrassed to walk down the street. People would come up and say, 'I heard you were dead!' But I had to remind myself that a lot of the stuff I went through was pretty brutal. I'm definitely thankful that some of the rough patches are behind me. ~ Natasha Lyonne

Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing. ~ Albert Camus

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people. ~ Albert Camus

It is necessary to fall in love ... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway. ~ Albert Camus

Thus he became one with a life in its pure state, he rediscovered a paradise given only to the most private or the most intelligent animals. At the point where the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth and with it his extreme glory, his extreme love. ~ Albert Camus

Lenin, therefore, begins from the firm and definite principle that the State dies as soon as the socialization of the
means of production is achieved and the exploiting class has consequently been suppressed. Yet, in the same
pamphlet, he ends by justifying the preservation, even after the socialization of the means of production and, without
any predictable end, of the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people. The pamphlet, which
makes continual reference to the experiences of the Commune, flatly contradicts the contemporary federalist and
anti-authoritarian ideas that produced the Commune; and it is equally opposed to the optimistic forecasts of Marx
and Engels. The reason for this is clear; Lenin had not forgotten that the Commune failed. As for the means of such
a surprising demonstration, they were even more simple: with each new difficulty encountered by the revolution, the
State as described by Marx is endowed with a supplementary prerogative. Ten pages farther on, without any kind of
transition, Lenin in effect affirms that power is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters "and also to direct
the great mass of the population, peasantry, lower middle classes, and semi-proletariat, in the management of the
socialist economy." The shift here is undeniable; the provisional State of Marx and Engels is charged with a new
mission, which risks prolonging its life indefinitely. Al ~ Albert Camus

Hawthorne was able to say of Melville that, as an unbeliever, he was extremely uneasy in his unbelief. It
can equally well be said of the poets who rushed to assault the heavens, with the intent of turning
everything upside down, that by so doing they affirmed their desperate nostalgia for order. As an ultimate
contradiction, they wanted to extract reason from unreason and to systematize the irrational. These heirs
of romanticism claimed to make poetry exemplary and to find, in its most harrowing aspects, the real way
of life. They deified blasphemy and transformed poetry into experience and into a means of action. Until
their time those who claimed to influence men and events, at least in the Occident, did so in the name of
rational rules. On the contrary, surrealism, after Rimbaud, wanted to find constructive rules in insanity
and destruction. Rimbaud, through his work and only
through his work, pointed out the path, but with the blinding, momentary illumination of a flash of
lightning. Surrealism excavated this path and codified its discoveries. By its excesses as well as by its
retreats, it gave the last and most magnificent expression to a practical theory of irrational rebellion at the
very same time when, on another path, rebellious thought was founding the cult of absolute reason.
Lautreamont and Rimbaud - its sources of inspiration - demonstrate by what stages the irrational desire
to accept appear ~ Albert Camus

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up. ~ Albert Camus

A rogue who has been condemned to death by the
tribunal says he wants to resist oppression simply because he wants to resist the scaffold!" Saint-Just's
indignation is hard to understand in that, until his time, the scaffold was precisely nothing else but one of
the most obvious symbols of oppression. But at the heart of this logical delirium, at the logical conclusion
of this morality of virtue, the scaffold represents freedom. It assures rational unity, and harmony in the
ideal city. It purifies (the word is apt) the Republic and eliminates malpractices that arise to contradict the
general will and universal reason. "They question my right to the title of philanthropist," Marat exclaims,
in quite a different style. "Ah, what injustice! Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a
great number?" A few - a faction? Naturally - and all historic actions are performed at this price. But
Marat, making his final calculations, claimed two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads. But he
compromised the therapeutic aspect of the operation by screaming during the massacre: "Brand them with
hot irons, cut off their thumbs, tear out their tongues." This philanthropist wrote day and night, in the
most monotonous vocabulary imaginable, of the necessity of killing in order to create. He wrote again, by
candlelight deep down in his cellar, during the September nights while his henchmen were installing
spec ~ Albert Camus

I would make another effort to divert my thoughts. I would listen to my heartbeat. I couldn't imagine that this sound which had been with me for so long could ever stop. 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. But it was no use. ~ Albert Camus

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today. ~ Albert Camus

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. ~ Albert Camus

Court was adjourned and my lawyer sat back down. He looked exhausted. But his colleagues came over to shake his hand. I heard: 'That was brilliant!' One of them even appealed to me...'Wasn't it?' he said. I agreed, but my congratulations weren't sincere, because I was too tired ~ Albert Camus

That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi from the great despairs we all suffer from. ~ Albert Camus

Words always take on the color of the deeds or sacrifices they evoke. ~ Albert Camus

What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners? ~ Albert Camus

Happiness is not everything and men have their duties. Mine is to find my mother, a homeland ~ Albert Camus

Long reflection on the condition of mankind as people
sentenced to death only leads to the justification of crime. Ivan simultaneously hates the death penalty
(describing an execution, he says furiously: "His head fell, in the name of divine grace") and condones
crime, in principle. Every indulgence is allowed the murderer, none is allowed the executioner. This
contradiction, which Sade swallowed with ease, chokes Ivan Karamazov. ~ Albert Camus

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. ~ Albert Camus

I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don't really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman's bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise? ~ Albert Camus

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? ~ Albert Camus

The very agony
of death experienced in the humiliation of the entire being lifts the slave to the level of human totality. He
knows, henceforth, that this totality exists; now it only remains for him to conquer it through a long series
of struggles against nature and against the masters. History identifies itself, therefore, with the history of
endeavor and rebellion. It is hardly astonishing that Marxism-Leninism derived from this dialectic the
contemporary ideal of the soldier worker. ~ Albert Camus

At the first stage of his dialectic, Hegel affirms that in so far as death is the common ground of man and
animal, it is by accepting death and even by inviting it that the former differentiates himself from the
latter. At the heart of this primordial struggle for recognition, man is thus identified with violent death.
The mystic slogan "Die and become what you are" is taken up once more by Hegel. But "Become what
you are" gives place to "Become what you so far are not." This primitive and passionate desire for
recognition, which is confused with the will to exist, can be satisfied only by a recognition gradually
extended until it embraces everyone. In that everyone wants equally much to be recognized by everyone,
the fight for life will cease only with the recognition of all by all, which will mark the termination of
history. The existence that Hegelian consciousness seeks to obtain is born in the hard-won glory of
collective approval. ~ Albert Camus

The French Revolution, by claiming to build history on the principle of absolute purity,
inaugurates modern times simultaneously with the era of formal morality. ~ Albert Camus

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man. ~ Albert Camus

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it. ~ Albert Camus

To think the way you do, you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.
On both perhaps. ~ Albert Camus

The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labor and culture. ~ Albert Camus