Camus Quotes

[genoveva]

"I should be able to love my country and still love justice." ~Albert Camus

[Union Jack]

"Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question."
Albert Camus

"Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day."
Albert Camus

"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."
Albert Camus

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
Albert Camus

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."
Albert Camus

"He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool."
Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951)

I Love Camus, those are some of my favourites.

[Bandini]

"In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death"

[Bandini]

I find the above quote so profound - but here is a little explanation from the man himself for those who have not read (do so now it is great) L'Etranger (The Outsider):


"A long time ago, I summed up The Outsider in a sentence which I realise is extremely paradoxical. 'In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.' I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. 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. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him."

[The Unnamable]

But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him."
He wouldn't last five minutes on this Forum. :D

[genoveva]

"One must understand what fear means in a world where murder is legitimate, and where human life is considered trifling...All I ask is that in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice." ~Albert Camus

[Ron Price]

ARK OF THE COVENANT

There are such a variety of notebooks, diaries, journals, records, work-books, quarries and resources kept and used by writers and poets for their writings. Albert Camus, to mention but one, began a literary diary in ordinary school exercise books at the age of twenty-two in May 1935 and in 1954 typed them into seven notebooks. Back in 1935 he had no intention of publishing his jottings, his diary entries, but when he typed them in 1954 he did. Camus did not view these notebooks as fragments, as a part, of an autobiography. Entries of a personal nature recording private feelings and inner experiences came into his notebooks more and more as the years went on, thus changing the original character of his originally quite impersonal diary. But, even then, we learn little about what he did. Because he only made periodic, episodic entries, readers get no comprehensive picture of either his day-to-day life or his thoughts. He jotted down only what he thought might be useful to him, partly due to problems of memory, partly due to what he called his profoundly anarchic temperament and partly for a host of reasons we will never know. His notebooks can be found in three volumes: 1935-1942, 1942-1951 and 1951-1959.-Ron Price with thanks to Philip Thody(trans, intro and notes), Albert Camus, Carnets: 1935-1942, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1963.

You just finished your notebooks,
Albert, when I was getting on board
a new ship-of-state that had had its
start in Canada sixty-years before.1

Your anti-autobiographical notebooks,
so unlike mine...where we learn little
about you, your family, the events of
your time. You built-up your sense of
self as writer, piece by piece, solitary.2

Your indispensable solitariness, your
modus operandi, modus vivendi, your
style and consciousness--even if sociable
and conscientious, wholeheartedly genuine,
passionate, cuing into the historically real,
relevant—from 1935 to 1960—through two
dozen years of the start of that Plan-Epoch
quite beyond the ken of most men, but not
the angels who helped our generation build
that Arc of the Covenant, rising everywhere
in the world, Albert, slowly.....do you see it,3
Albert, do you see it in your new home in
that mysterious and Undiscovered Country?

1 I joined the Canadian Baha’i community in 1959, then in its 62nd year.
2 For some ideas and information in this prose-poem, I have drawn on Susan Sontag’s “The Ideal Husband,” The New York Review of Books, 26 September 1963. Sontag reviews Camus’ Notebooks: 1935-1942. Her review was published just five months into the tenth and last stage of history, to draw on one of the Bahá’í historical paradigms.
3 “In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself.... We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.”-Camus, Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, 1957.

Ron Price
6 July 2007

[hastalavictoria]

i love camus! awesome topic

[mcvv09]

My mother died-The Stranger

[shai]

I couldnt find this online, I had to type it up from the text, from his essay Irony:

"None of this fits together? How very true! A woman you leave behind to go to the movies, an old man to whom you have stopped listening, a death that redeems nothing, and then, on the other hand, the whole radiance of the world. What difference does it make if you accept everything? Here are three destinies, different and yet alike. Death for us all, but his own death to each. After all, the sun still warms our bones for us."

[atticus]

My mother died-The Stranger

Actually, wasn't it something more along the lines of "Maman died today." It was the opening line of the book if I am not mistaken. At least that's how my translation went.

[Gracewings]

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." ~Albert Camus

[qimissung]

"A man without ethics is a wild beast, loosed upon the world."

"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"

"The only real progress lies in learning how to be wrong all alone." ~Albert Camus

[qimissung]

good poem, Ron Price.

[Mr. Vandemar]

This is a quote from The Fall. Do not take it literally.

"I live in the Jewish quarter or what was called so until our Hitlerian brethren made room. What a cleanup! Seventy-five thousand Jews deported or assassinated; that's real vacuum-cleaning. I admire that diligence, that methodical patience!"

This quote is especially meaningful to me because it enrages me (obviously on purpose by Camus) and makes me hate Jean-Baptiste Clamence. His idiotic and misinformed views and his ignorance are an example of what I dislike the most (especially amongst the upper class).

[Bumbeli]

I don't really know the correct translation for this one as I read it in german, but when I was 15 and just starting to get into literature, this one really impressed me. It goes something like this:
I don't want to die and I'm going to fight. But when the game is lost, I want to be a good loser.
(would appreciate if someone could hook me up with the correct version)

[Peggy-O]

"Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined" - Camus

[Lust Hogg]

"then all stream out into the open, drug themselves with talking, start arguing or love-making , and in the last glow of sunset the town,freighted with lovers two by two and loud with voices, drifts like a helmless ship into the the throbbing darkness. In vain a zealous evangelist with a felt hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease" God is great and good.Come unto him" on the contrary they all make haste towards some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than god"
(The Plague) undoubtedly my favorite of his works!!!!

[A Siege]

"Integrity has no need of rules."

[PoeticPassions]

"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 who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."

"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."


ahh, Camus has sooo many good ones... a lot of wise quotes and passages. (sorry if there is a repeat in here)