"But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man."
Albert Camus, The Plague
(Source: human-voices, via human-voices)
"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is one whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. ‘Can they be brought together?’ This is a practical question. We must get down to it. ‘I despise intelligence’ really means ‘I cannot bear my doubts.’"
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
(Source: human-voices)
"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. The divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity."
Albert Camus
(Source: human-voices)
“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
- Albert Camus
"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself."
Albert Camus
(Source: oafcat, via chloethunders)
"What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying."
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
(Source: wordsfrombooks)
"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
Albert Camus
"Moment of adorable silence. But the song of the world rises and I, a prisoner chained deep in the cave, am filled with delight before I have time to desire. Eternity is here while I was waiting for it. Now I can speak. I do not know what I could wish for rather than this continued presence of self with self. What I want now is not happiness but awareness. One thinks one has cut oneself off from the world, but it is enough to see an olive tree upright in morning sun, to feel this separation melt away."
Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935-1951
(Source: human-voices)
"A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."
Albert Camus
(via human-voices)
"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction."
"Storm sky in August. Gusts of hot wind. Black clouds. Yet in the East 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."
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, translated by Philip Thody
(via cocteautwin)
"Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live."
Albert Camus, Myth of Sisyphus
(Source: ashotofhelena, via human-voices)
"Certain nights whose gentleness is prolonged - these help one to die, knowing that such evenings will return on the earth after us."
(Source: lonelywreckage)
