Albert Camus Quotes on Life
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There is not love of life without despair about life.
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Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
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I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.
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What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.
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What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
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At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
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It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm - this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
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If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.
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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.
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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?
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The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
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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. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
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To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.
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The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.
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At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.
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'My field,' said Goethe, 'is time.' That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.
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Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
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Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
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You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.
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One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. 'What! - by such narrow ways - ?' There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness.
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'I conclude that all is well,' says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
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There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
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In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.
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Let's not beat around the bush; I love life - that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
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N'attendez pas le Jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours.
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A healthy attitude also includes faults.
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A little thought estranges from life, whereas much thought reconciles to life. Unable to refine the real, thought pauses to mimic it.
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A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and best of a life are devoted to earning that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
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Being able to remain on that dizzying crest - that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.
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Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.
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But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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Creating is living doubly.
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Even men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not fall asleep on theirs either.
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For men of today there is an inner way, which I know well from having taken it in both directions, leading from the spiritual hilltops to the capitals of crime. And doubtless one can always rest, fall asleep on the hilltop or board with crime. But if one forgoes a part of what is, one must forgo being oneself; one must forgo living or loving otherwise than by proxy. There is thus a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most in this world.
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Half a man's life is spent in implying, in turning away, and in keeping silent.
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If our age admits, with equanimity, that murder has its justifications, it is because of this indifference to life which is the mark of nihilism.
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If something worth living for is worth dying for, what about something not worth dying for?
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In my case, I have always drawn my hope from the idea of fecundity.
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In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the 'cogito' in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel - therefore we exist.
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In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn.
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In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and the price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
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Life can be magnificent and overwhelming - That is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
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Life is this dichotomy itself, the mind soaring over volcanoes of light, the madness of justice, the extenuating intransigence of moderation.
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Live to the point of tears.
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None among us is authorized to despair of a single man, except after his death, which transforms his life into destiny and then permits a definitive judgment. But pronouncing the definitive judgment before his death, decreeing the closing of accounts when the creditor is still alive, is no man's right. On this limit, at least, whoever judges absolutely condemns himself absolutely.
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Of all kinds of fate the least deceptive is the one that is lived.
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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.
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The divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life - it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live.
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The important thing, as Abbe Galiani said to Mme d'Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments.
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The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their most profound manifestations, are centuries that have tried to live without transcendence.
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There are no just people - merely hearts more or less lacking in justice. Living at least allows us to discover this and to add to the sum of our actions a little of the good that will make up in part for the evil we have added to the world. Such a right to live, which allows a chance to make amends, is the natural right of every man, even the worst man... Without that right, moral life is utterly impossible.
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There is not one human being who, above a certain elementary level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to find formulas or attitudes that will give his existence the unity it lacks. Appearance and action, the dandy and the revolutionary, all demand unity in order to exist, and in order to exist on this earth.
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There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
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Those who reject the agony of living and dying wish to dominate.
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To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.
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When the meaning of life has been suppressed, there still remains life.
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You will never be happy if you keep searching for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you keep looking for the meaning of life without living it.