Albert Camus Notebooks Quotes

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

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.

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

I’m going to tell you something: thoughts are never honest. Emotions are.

If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them … they could perceive what they have made of us.

How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.

Rule: Start by looking for what is valid in every man.

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

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.

When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.

You do not have to unburden your soul for everyone; it will be enough if you do that for those you love.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

For years I’ve wanted to live according to everyone else’s morals. I’ve forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth–after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.

Some are created to love, while the others - to live.

What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

The feeling that we are all neglected and lonely but not so lonely that "others" do not see us in trouble, saves us from the worst suffering.

People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.

A practical rule: a man which is wise in one area may be silly in others.

It would be the most peaceful to love in silence, but there are consciousness and personality, so we have to speak. And then love becomes hell.

A pure love is a dead love.

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

Somebody inside of me has always tried, with all his strength, to be nobody.

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.

Only the one who does not know what is life may believe that it is beautiful and easy.

No one realises that some individuals consume herculesque forces only to be normal.

My life was lucky so that I met, I loved (and disappointed) only outstanding people.

You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.

Give up the tyranny of female charm.

Essay on tragedy. (1) The silence of Prometheus. (2) The Elizabethans. (3) Moliere. (4) The spirit of revolt.

Why I'm an artist, not a philosopher? Because I think in words rather than ideas.

Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question.

I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.

When a conscious being appeared, the world went blank.

When the time to die comes, it does not matter how and when it happens.

A love that does not bear collision with reality is not a real love. But then the inability to love is a privilege of the noble hearts.

You’re worried about getting things successfully done in order to attain some degree of self-worth. Your soul is for sale; You most likely deceive yourself in order to convince yourself. Letting go equals failing, isn’t that right? And you forget outstandingly well, don’t you? You forget that It takes admirable courage not only to try but also to gracefully give up.

A life, whose purpose is money, is death.

Maybe Christ died for somebody but not for me.

The beginning of war is similar to the beginning of peace — the world and the heart know nothing about it.

And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. — Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942 (Paragon House Publishers, 1991)

Every time a man (myself) gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. Every time, it has always been the great misfortune of wanting to show off which has lessened me in the presence of the truth. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary. I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one’s secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown.

I kept myself aloof from the world not because I had enemies, but because I had friends there. Not because they damaged me, as this happens usually, but because they thought I'm better than I really am. It was a lie that I could not stand.

Happiness is often only a pity for one's own misfortune.

There are very few large and many poor feelings in everyone's life.

Solitude must be accepted with all its difficulties.

Doubts are the innermost corner of our souls. One must not talk about his doubts, whatever they may be.

Thought is always out in front. It sees too far, farther than the body which lives in the present.

I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that i finally obey.

We live in a world where one needs to choose - to be the victim or the executioner, and nothing else.

People always think that a suicide is commited for one reason. But it is perfectly possible to commit a suicide for two reasons.

The first thing to do is to keep silent – to abolish audiences and learn to be your own judge. To keep a balance between active concern for the body and an attentive awareness of being alive. To abandon all claims and devote yourself to achieving two kinds of freedom: freedom from money, and freedom from your own vanity and cowardice. To have rules and stick to them. Two years is not too long to spend thinking about one single point. You must wipe out all earlier stages, and concentrate all your strength on forgetting nothing and learning patiently.

February 13, 1936 I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps... Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.

There are accidents that last the whole life.

Time drips, heavy, slow…

Living with one’s passions amounts to living with one’s sufferings, which are the counterpoise, the corrective, the balance and the price. When a man has learned — and not on paper — how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, the illusions that others may share, then he has little left to learn.

People, who suffer from sadness and suddenly become happy, betray themselves: they stick to happiness, as if to hug, and strangle it out of jealousy.

Deepest thoughts and major works eventually become insignificant.

There are more things in people that are rather worth of admiration than contempt.

You would not write about loneliness so much if you knew how to get the most out of it

For people like me, the face just says that we die alone.

We love people not because for good they did for us, but for good we did for them.

We are created to live side by side. However, we only die for ourselves.

The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking the world to give him.

if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.

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.

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?

Storm sky in August. Gusts of hot wind. Black clouds. Yet in the East is a delicate, transparent band of blue sky. Impossible to look at it. Its presence is a torture for the eyes and for the soul, because 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.

It is not true that the heart wears out — but the body creates this illusion.

Time flies so fast because it does not have any guidance. Like the moon in its zenith or the horizon.

Person describes himself throughout life. To know oneself perfectly means to die.

The anachronism is the worst thing to use at the theatre.

As the death of the writer exaggerates the role of his work, the death of a person exaggerates the role of his effect on us.

You help far more when you depict a person favorably than instruct its weaknesses.

Start by looking for what is valid in every human being.

Life is crammed with events that encourage us to want to get old.

When you have an elevated spirit and a miserable heart, you write great things and do the poor.

It is not the melancholy of ruined things that breaks the heart, but the desperate love of what lasts eternally in eternal youth: love of the future.

The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking this world to give him.

We lead a difficult life, not always managing to fit our actions to the vision we have of the world. (And when I think I have caught a glimpse of the color of my fate, it flees from my gaze.) We struggle and suffer to reconquer our solitude. But a day comes when the earth has its simple and primitive smile. Then, it is as if the struggles and life within us were rubbed out. Millions of eyes have looked at this landscape, and for me it is like the first smile of the world. It takes me out of myself, in the deepest meaning of the expression. It assures me that nothing matters except my love, and that even this love has no value for me unless it remains innocent and free. It denies me a personality, and deprives my suffering of its echo. The world is beautiful, and this is everything. The great truth which it patiently teaches me is that neither the mind nor even the heart has any importance. And that the stone warmed by the stone or the cypress tree swelling against the empty sky set a boundary to the only world in which "to be right" has any meaning: nature without men. This world reduces me to nothing. It carries me to the very end. Without anger, it denies that I exist. And, agreeing to my defeat, I move toward a wisdom where everything has already been conquered -- except that tears come into my eyes, and this great sob of poetry which swells my heart makes me forget the truth of the world.

Smiling despair. No solution, but constantly exercising an authority over myself that I know is useless. The essential thing is not to lose oneself, and not to lose that part of oneself that lies sleeping in the world.

I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one's secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown. My deepest joy is to write. To accept the world and to accept pleasure—but only when I am stripped bare of everything. I should not be worthy to love the bare and empty beaches if I could not remain naked in the presence of myself. For the first time I can understand the meaning of the word happiness without any ambiguity. It is a little different from what men normally mean when they say: 'i am happy.

When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.

Any fulfillment is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher fulfillment.

It is almost impossible to watch a clockwise direction - it gets extremely boring and causes despair.

Three years to make a book, five lines to ridicule it, and the quotations wrong.

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.

A time comes when one can no longer feel the emotion of love. The only thing left is tragedy. Living for someone or for something no longer has any meaning. Nothing seems to keep its meaning except the idea of dying for something.

Intellectuel ? Oui. Et ne jamais renier. Intellectuel : celui qui se dédouble. Ça me plaît. Je suis content d'être les deux. [...] « Je méprise l'intelligence » signifie en réalité : « Je ne peux supporter mes doutes ». Je préfère tenir les yeux ouverts.

I force myself to write this diary, but my reluctance is exquisite. I know now why I never kept a personal diary: for me life is secretive. With respect to others (and that is what pained X. so much) but also, life must be lived through my own eyes, I must not reveal it in words. Unheard and unexposed, like this it is rich for me. If I force myself to keep a personal diary at this moment, it is out of panic in the face of my failing memory. But I am not sure I can continue. Besides, even so, I forget to note many things. And I say nothing of what I think.

One must not cut oneself from the world. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. My whole effort, whatever situation, misfortune or disillusion, must be to make contact again. But even within this sadness I feel a great leap of joy and a great desire to love simply at the sight of a hill against the evening sky.

It's always useless to try to cut oneself off, even from other people's cruelty and stupidity. You can't say: "I don't know about it." One either fights or collaborates. There is nothing less excusable than war, and the appeal to national hatreds. But once war has come, it is both cowardly and useless to try to stand on one side under the pretext that one is not responsible. Ivory towers are down. Indulgence is forbidden—for oneself as well as for other people. It is both impossible and immoral to judge an event from outside. One keeps the right to hold this absurd misfortune in contempt only by remaining inside it. One individual's reaction has no intrinsic importance. It can be of some use, but I can justify nothing. Dilettante's dream of being free to hover above his time is the most ridiculous form of liberty. This is why I must try to serve. And, if they don't want me, I must also accept the position of the "despised civilian." In both cases, I am absolutely free to judge things and to feel as disgusted with them as I like. In both cases, I am in the midst of the war and have the right to judge it. To judge it and to act

Today, I feel free about the past and about what I have lost. All I want is this compactness and enclosed space—this lucid and patient fervor. And like the warm bread that one kneads and presses I simply want to hold my life between my hands, like the men who knew how to enclose their life between these flowers and these columns. The same is true of those long nights spent on trains, where one can talk to oneself, prepare oneself for life, and feel marvelously patient in taking up ideas again, stopping them in their fight, and then once more moving forward. To lick one's life like a stick of barley sugar, to form, sharpen, and finally fall in love with it, in the same way as one searches for the word, the image, the definitive sentence, the word or image which marks a close or a conclusion, from which one can start out again and which will color the way we see the world. I can easily stop now, and finally reach the end of a year of unrestrained and over restrained life. My effort now is to carry this presence of myself to myself through to the very end, to maintain it whatever aspect my life takes on—even at the price of the loneliness which I know is so difficult to bear. Not to give way—that is the whole secret. Not to surrender, not to betray. All the violent part of my character helps me in this, carrying me to the point where I am rejoined by my love, and by the furious passion for life which gives meaning to my days.

Да, мне было больно от того, что я от тебя узнал. Но ты не должна грустить потому, что грущу я. Я знаю, что не прав, но хотя я и не могу помешать сердцу быть несправедливым, я все же рано или поздно сумею призвать его к объективности. Мне будет не очень трудно преодолеть несправедливость, угнездившуюся в моем сердце. Я знаю, что сделал все, чтобы отдалить тебя от себя. Со мной так было всю жизнь: едва кто-то привязывался ко мне, я делал все возможное, чтобы отпугнуть его. Разумеется, свою роль сыграли и моя нынешняя неспособность брать на себя обязательства, моя привычка быть всегда с разными людьми, мой пессимистический взгляд на самого себя. Но, вероятно, я все же не был настолько легкомысленным, как я сейчас об этом говорю. Первая моя любовь, которой я был верен, ускользнула от меня, предпочтя наркотики и предательство. Видимо, многое идет именно оттуда, в том числе и эта суетная боязнь новых страданий, хотя их-то на мою долю всегда хватало. Однако с тех пор я неизменно ускользал от всех и, наверное, втайне желал, чтобы и от меня все ускользали. Даже Х.: чего только я не сделал, чтобы охладить ее чувства ко мне. Не думаю, однако, чтобы она в самом деле от меня ускользнула, чтобы она, пусть мимолетно, отдалась другому. Я в этом не уверен (...). Но если бы она так не поступила, то речь здесь шла бы исключительно о проявлении ее внутренней готовности к героизму, а вовсе не о такой любви, которая стремится все отдать, ничего не прося взамен. Так что мною сделано решительно все, чтобы ты ускользнула от меня. И чем сильнее завораживал тот сентябрь, тем более укреплялось во мне желание вырваться из-под действия этих чар. В общем, можно сказать, ты от меня ускользнула. Таков закон этого мира, пусть иногда ужасный. На предательство отвечают предательством, на притворство в любви - бегством от любви. К тому же в данном случае я, требовавший и испытавший на себе все виды свободы, признаю справедливым и правильным, чтобы и ты в свою очередь испытала одну-две ее разновидности. Причем список далеко не закончен. Что же касается того, чем мне можно помочь, я постараюсь помочь себе сам, и не только водворением в мое сердце холодной объективности, но и той симпатией, той нежностью, которую я к тебе испытываю. Иногда я виню себя за неспособность любить. Вероятно, так оно и есть, но все же я оказался способен выбрать нескольких людей и честно отдать им лучшее, что во мне было, - как бы они ни повели себя потом.