"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."
— Albert Camus - “An Absurd Reasoning,” The Myth of Sisyphus
"In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it."
— Albert Camus - “An Absurd Reasoning,” The Myth of Sisyphus
"I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life…On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life if not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."
— Albert Camus - “An Absurd Reasoning,” The Myth of Sisyphus
"There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night."
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
(Source: frenchtwist, via fuckyeahexistentialism)
"There was a night in the history of humanity when a man weighed down with all his destiny looked at his sleeping companions and, alone in a silent world, declared that no one must sleep, but that all must watch to the end of time. We are still living in times like these."
— Albert Camus - from an article in Soir-Republicain
"What am I doing here, what is the point of these smiles and gestures? My home is neither here nor elsewhere. And the world has become merely unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. Foreign - who can know what this word means?"
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"Many men who glory in the senses do so only because they are slaves to them. Here, too, they embrace the vulture which is eating them away."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"One evening, when we look in the mirror, we see a deeper line around our mouth. What is it? The stuff from which I made the happiness I overcame."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"If it is true that the absurd has been fulfilled (or, rather, revealed), then it follows that no experience has any value in itself, and that all our actions are equally instructive. The will is nothing. Acceptance is everything. On one condition: that, faced with the humblest or the most heart-rending experience, man should always be ‘present’; and that he should endure this experience without flinching, with complete lucidity."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in a time of peace. But war teaches us all to lose everything and become what we were not."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves. For most people, it’s the embarrassment, the need to make a choice, the choice which makes them go but feel remorse for not having been brave enough to stay at home, or which makes them stay at home but regret that they can’t share the way the others are going to die.
It’s there, that’s where it really is, and we were looking for it in the blue sky and the world’s indifference. It is in this terrible loneliness both of the combatants and of the noncombatants, in this humiliated despair that we all feel, in the baseness that we feel growing in our faces as the days go by. The reign of beasts has begun.
"
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"What I touch, what resists me-that is what I understand. And these two certainties-my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to rational and reasonable principle-I also know that I cannot reconcile them. If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world."
— Albert Camus (via eclecstasy)
(via philossofos)
![This made my day in Paris today :] Pick up a copy, people!](http://24.media.tumblr.com/14d22be413cecdd20ac3bd17eb97b481/tumblr_mkwiyyokvq1qg2775o1_500.jpg)