Tao Te Ching
Albert Camus
1913 – 1960 CE
Journalist, playwright, philosopher, pacifist, philhellene, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Paradox of the Absurd champion; Camus grew up with an impoverished and illiterate mother who survived working as a house cleaner after his father was killed in WWI. Devoted to human rights, he worked in the French Resistance, for UNESCO, and protested against the Soviet police state. He passionately opposed capital punishment as well as all the other forms of totalitarianism. Philosophically he understood relative versus absolute understanding, rejected hope, criticized nihilism, pointed out the absurdity of our many paradoxes and confused, dualistic fixations, and explored the absurdity of finding the meaningfulness of life in external action. In many ways he wrestled with the same issues as Protagoras, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu.
Lineages
Apostles of Doubt Artists French
Eras
Unlisted Sources
Notebooks
Notebooks, 1942-1951
The First Man (1994)
Quotes by Albert Camus (23 quotes)
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Chapters:
13. Honor and Disgrace
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“Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.”
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“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
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“I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.”
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“Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.”
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“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
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“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
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“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
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“Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
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“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
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“Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.”
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“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
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“The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.”
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“The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
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“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
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“Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.”
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“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
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“Few realize how much energy most people expend just trying to be ‘normal.’”
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“Without work, all life goes rotten but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”
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“If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Marxism, pessimistic as to destiny, pessimistic as to human nature, is optimistic as to the progress of history.”
from Notebooks, 1942-1951
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“Come to terms with death. Thereafter, anything is possible.”
from Notebooks
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“still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever.”
from The First Man (1994)
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