"To keep going to the end means not only resisting but also relaxing. I need to be aware of myself, in so far as this is also an awareness of something that goes beyond me as an individual. I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am." -- Albert Camus
"Don't give way to conformity and to office hours. Don't give up. Never give up--always demand more. But stay lucid, even during office hours. As soon as we are alone in its presence, strive after the nakedness into which the world rejects us. But above all, in order to be, never try to seem." -- Albert Camus
"The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it." --Albert Camus
"What do we mean by saying the existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterward." --Jean-Paul Sartre
"Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." --Jean-Paul Sartre
"We always exaggerate the importance of an individual life. So many people don't know what to do with theirs that it is not completely immoral to take it from them. On the other hand, everything takes on a new value. But this has already been said. The essential absurdity of this catastrophe does not alter the fact that it exists. It generalizes the rather more essential absurdity of life itself. It makes it more immediate and more relevant." -- Albert Camus
"'I don't think they quite understood me the day before yesterday when I battered the officiating priest over the head with the mallet that he was going to use to kill the heifer. Yet it was very simple. I wanted, just for once, to change the order of things--just to see what happened. And what I saw was that nothing was changed. The spectators were surprised and a little frightened. Apart from that, the sun went down at the same time. The conclusion which I drew was that it doesn't matter if you change the order of things.'" -- Albert Camus
"...what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying." -- Albert Camus
"Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that that experience had 'undermined' him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined." -- Albert Camus
"Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the tragic seriously is not so grievous, but it helps to judge a man." -- Albert Camus
Text Gear
