Albert Camus: Trending quotes (page 6)

“The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall.”

Albert Camus

Correspondance: 1932-1960, p.220, Gallimard, 1981. Letter to Jean Granier, 1957 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=56VcAAAAMAAJ&q=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&dq=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAWoVChMIqfiA3aHcyAIVgw6QCh3IngRL

World , Time , Waiting , Parting

“Fate is not in man but around him.”

Albert Camus book A Happy Death

A Happy Death (1971)

Fate

“We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.”

Albert Camus

"Helen's Exile" (1948)

Beauty

“Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”

Albert Camus book The Fall

The Fall (1956)

Truth , Beauty , Light

“The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.”

Albert Camus book The Rebel

Part 4: Rebellion and Art
The Rebel (1951)

Men , World

“There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.”

Albert Camus

Widely attributed to Camus on the internet, the earliest attribution of such a statement to him yet located is an unsourced citation in Quotations from the Wayside (1999) by Brenda Wong: "Many things are worth dying for, but none worth killing for." The earliest occurrence yet located of such a statement, by anyone, is one by Albert Dietrich in a 31 January 1943 letter to his conscientious objector status Hearing Officer, reported in Army GI, Pacifist CO : The World War II Letters of Frank and Albert Dietrich (2005) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3o4JN_C69VwC edited by Scott H. Bennett: "There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for."
Prior to the attribution to Camus, the most widely publicized occurrence of such an expression was probably in the song "Too Long A Soldier" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoQcU1ecPOc by Neil Giraldo and Myron Grombacher, sung by Pat Benatar on her album Wide Awake In Dreamland (1988): "I've seen so much worth dying for, so little worth killing over."
Misattributed

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.”

Albert Camus

"Three Interviews" in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970)

Dead

“Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.”

Albert Camus book The Plague

The Plague (1947)

Books , Way , Travel , Time

“We all have a weakness for beauty.”

Albert Camus book The First Man

The First Man (1960; published in 1994)

Beauty

“To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation

Wisdom , Color , Way , Future

“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

Kirilov
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation

“There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.”

Albert Camus

Il y a toujours une philosophie pour le manque de courage.
Notebooks (1942–1951)

Courage

“Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”

Albert Camus

American Journals (1978)

Cry , Night

“There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.”

Albert Camus book The Plague

The Plague (1947)

Time

“What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

"Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka"
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Secret

“Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.”

Albert Camus book The Rebel

The Rebel (1951)

World , Solitude , Heart , Fight

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Albert Camus

To be found on quotes sites, but always without citation.
Disputed

World , Way

“Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Albert Camus

Pablo Picasso said something very similar. Perhaps it is the source? From Herschel B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art: "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand."
Disputed

Truth , Lie

“Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus

God , Secret