Browse 142 quotes about Albert Camus.
“In Paris it is possible to be homesick for space and a beating of wings.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Probably one has to live in Algiers for some time in order to realize how paralyzing an excess of nature’s bounty can be. There is nothing here for whoever would learn, educate himself, or better himself. This country has no lessons to teach. It neither promises nor affords glimpses. It is satisfied to give, but in abundance. It is completely accessible to the eyes, and you know it the moment you enjoy it. Its pleasures are without remedy and its joys without hope. Above all, it requires clairvoyant souls—that is, without solace.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Strange country that gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and his misery!”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“In the neighborhood movies in Algiers peppermint lozenges are sometimes sold with, stamped in red, all that is necessary to the awakening of love: (1) questions: “When will you marry me?” “Do you love me?” and (2) replies: “Madly,” “Next spring.” After having prepared the way, you pass them to your neighbor, who answers likewise or else turns a deaf ear. At Belcourt marriages have been arranged this way and whole lives been pledged by the mere exchange of peppermint lozenges. And this really depicts the childlike people of this region.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The distinguishing mark of youth is perhaps a magnificent vocation for facile joys. But, above all, it is a haste to live that borders on waste.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But, all in all, I see nothing sacred in death and am well aware, on the other hand, of the distance there is between fear and respect. Everything here suggests the horror of dying in a country that invites one to live.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Between this sky and these faces turned toward it, nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion, but stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Is there anything odd in finding on earth that union that Plotinus longed for? Unity is expressed here in terms of sun and sea. The heart is sensitive to it through a certain savor of flesh which constitutes its bitterness and its grandeur.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I learn that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the sweep of days.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I know simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after my death? I am not expressing here the creature’s satisfaction with his condition.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. They try their skill at enjoyment and at “indulging in experiences.” But this is illusory. It requires a rare vocation to be a sensualist.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Gods of summer they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life, and they still are, deprived of all hope. I have seen two of them die. They were full of horror, but silent.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men 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?”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The desert itself has assumed significance; it has been glutted with poetry. For all the world’s sorrows it is a hallowed spot.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But at certain moments the heart wants nothing so much as spots devoid of poetry.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“It is possible to have less ambition and the same nostalgia.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“From Amsterdam Descartes writes to the aged Guez de Balzac: “I go out walking every day amid the confusion of a great crowd, with as much freedom and tranquillity as you could do on your garden paths.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“So much heavy beauty seems to come from another world.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“If the desert can be defined as a soulless place where the sky alone is king, then Oran is awaiting her prophets.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Books are written on Florence or Athens. Those cities have formed so many European minds that they must have a meaning. They have the means of moving to tears or of uplifting. They quiet a certain spiritual hunger whose bread is memory. But can one be moved by a city where nothing attracts the mind, where the very ugliness is anonymous, where the past is reduced to nothing? Emptiness, boredom, an indifferent sky, what are the charms of such places? Doubtless solitude and, perhaps, the human creature.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The patience of a true enthusiast is unlimited.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“For force and violence are solitary gods. They contribute nothing to memory. On the contrary, they distribute their miracles by the handful in the present. They are made for this race without past which celebrates its communions around the prize ring. These are rather difficult rites but ones that simplify everything. Good and evil, winner and loser.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“They are found on dusty little squares, resigned to rain and sun, they too converted to stone and boredom.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“An hour a day, every so often, it forces you to pay attention to something that has no importance.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Everything that is ephemeral wants to last.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“That permanence in the world has always had contrary charms for man. It drives him to despair and excites him. The world never says but one thing; first it interests, then it bores. But eventually it wins out by dint of obstinacy. It is always right.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Then there are incomparable nights under a rain of stars.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“So much solitude and nobility give these places an unforgettable aspect.”
Source: The Myths of Sisphus and Other Essays
“I cannot understand what kind of freedom would be given me by a higher being. I have lost the sense of hierarchy. The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action. Now if the absurd cancels all my chances of eternal freedom, it restores and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future means an increase in man’s availability.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Death is there as the only reality.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“After death the chips are down. I am not even free, either, to perpetuate myself, but a slave, and, above all, a slave without hope of an eternal revolution, without recourse to contempt. And who without revolution and without contempt can remain a slave? What freedom can exist in the fullest sense without assurance of eternity?”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Mystics, to begin with, find freedom in giving themselves. By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules, they become secretly free.”
“Everything that makes man work and get excited utilizes hope. The sole thought that is not mendacious is therefore a sterile thought. In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.”
“But of love I know only that mixture of desire, affection, and intelligence that binds me to this or that creature.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to he also without depth?”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Whence his interest in the theater, in the show, where so many fates are offered him, where he can accept the poetry without feeling the sorrow.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“An actor succeeds or does not succeed. A writer has some hope even if he is not appreciated. He assumes that his works will bear witness to what he was. At best the actor will leave us a photograph, and nothing of what he was himself, his gestures and his silences, his gasping or his panting with love, will come down to us. For him, not to be known is not to act, and not acting is dying a hundred times with all the creatures he would have brought to life or resuscitated.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Why should we be surprised to find a fleeting fame built upon the most ephemeral of creations?”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Eternity is not a game. A mind foolish enough to prefer a comedy to eternity has lost its salvation.”
“The greater number of different lives he has lived, the more aloof he can be from them. The time comes when he must die to the stage and for the world.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“People beautify only what they love, and death repels us and tires our patience. It, too, is to be conquered.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Creating or not creating changes nothing. The absurd creator does not prize his work. He could repudiate it. He does sometimes repudiate it.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Expression begins where thought ends. Those adolescents with empty eyesockets who people temples and museums—their philosophy has been expressed in gestures. For an absurd man it is more educative than all libraries. Under another aspect the same is true for music. If any art is devoid of lessons, it is certainly music. It is too closely related to mathematics not to have borrowed their gratuitousness.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The Church has been so harsh with heretics only because she deemed that there is no worse enemy than a child who has gone astray.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Art can never be so well served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated proceedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work as black is to white.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Too often the work of a creator is looked upon as a series of isolated testimonies.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“There is no mystery in human creation.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: there is no frontier between being and appearing.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays