7 Albert Camus Quotes on Knowledge

Albert Camus quotes on knowledge

31. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

33. I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

70. The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world -- and to pay attention to man.

78. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

179. Of whom and of what indeed can I say: 'I know that!' This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.

210. The philosopher, even if he is Kant, is a creator.

218. There are no frontiers between the disciplines that man sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock, and the same anxiety merges them.