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| Albert Camus
"We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that
made
it so vile. And now we realize that we know where
it lives,
that it is inside ourselves."
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world. A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.A time comes when one can no longer feel the emotion
of love. The only thing left is tragedy.
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.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. After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.After another moment's silence, she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very
same reason.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.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face. 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. All healthy men have thought of their own suicide.All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to footballAn intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means. As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone
whose conversation bores me, I pretend to agree.
As usual I finish the day before the sea, sumptuous this evening beneath the moon, which writes Arab symbols with phosphorescent streaks on the slow swells. There is no end to the sky and the waters. How well they accompany sadness!At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. Be careful of reading health books; you might die of a misprint.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. But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads? By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question. Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day. Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.Don't take anything seriously except happiness.Don't wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic. Every wall is a door, Emerson correctly said. Let
us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere
but in the wall against which we are living.
Instead, let us seek respite where it is --in the
very thick of the battle.Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.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. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it. In the clamour in which we live, love is impossible and justice does not suffice.Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other
way.He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool. How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing. 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.I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness. I have never believed in the power of truth itself. But it is at least worth
knowing that when expressed forcefully truth wins out over falsehood.I know of only one duty, and that is to love.I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day. I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is. I'll tell you a big secret, my friend: Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day.If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.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.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. If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.Integrity has no need of rules.It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all. It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. It's better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves.Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.Life is a sum of all your choices. Life is absurd.Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love. Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.Man's greatness lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And
if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to
be just himself.Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.Mother died today. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I don't know.
[Fr., Aujourd' hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas.]Murder is terribly exhausting.Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence. Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.Stupidity has a knack of getting its way. That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.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. The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. The innocent is the person who explains nothing.The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm. The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.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.The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all -- he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.The society based on production is only productive, not creative.The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.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. There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.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.There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. There is no virtue in giving to others what is useless to oneself.-There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.There's no need to hang about waiting for the last judgment. It takes place every day.Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.To abandon oneself to principles is really to die -- and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.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. To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.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. To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well. To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?To marry a woman who you love and who loves you is to lay a wager with her as to who will stop loving the other first.To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity. 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. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object. Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil. Walk beside me. And just be my friend.We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.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.We call first truths those we discover after all the others.We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.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.We rarely confide in those who are better than we are. We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying "no"?What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.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.Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and ''historical tasks'' is an actual or potential assassin.Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future. Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.Women in the street. The warm beast of desire that lies curled up in our
loins and stretches itself with fierce gentleness.Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence [His Or Her] heart first opened.You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question. 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.[I]n such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners. |
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