Albert Camus

Albert Camus:

(Mondovi, French Algeria, 7 November 1913 – Villeblevin, 4 January 1960).
French philosopher, journalist and writer of novels, essays and plays. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

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.

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

Autumn is the second spring when every leaf is a flower.

When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.

If you continue to endlessly seek the definition of happiness, you will never experience true happiness. Similarly, if you endlessly search for the purpose of life, you will never truly live.

Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Only truth can face injustice. Truth, or love.

The only means to fight the plague is honesty.

But the heart has its own memory, and I have forgotten nothing.

If man fails to reconcile justice and freedom, then he fails at everything.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

If the world was comprehensible, there would be no art.

There always comes a time in history when anyone who dares to say that two and two make four is punished by death. The teacher knows it well.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. Inside this aging body is a heart still as curious, still as hungry, still as full of longing as it was in youth. I sit at the window and watch the world pass by, feeling like a stranger in a strange land, unable to relate to the world outside, and yet within me, there burns the same fire that once thought it could conquer the world. And the real tragedy is that the world still remains, so distant and elusive, a place I could never quite grasp.

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion.

It is death which gives gambling and heroism their true meaning.

The beautiful September sky – and a kind of fury, rage, despair and love suddenly came to my heart.

I imagine you, all the time.

I shall not grow resigned. With all my silence, I shall protest to the very end. There is no reason to say: “It had to be.” It is my revolt which is right, and I must follow this joy which is like a pilgrim on earth, follow it step by step.

Why am I an artist and not a philosopher? Because I think according to words and not according to ideas.