Go Rin No Sho (1645)
Context: Second is the Water book. With water as the basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle, it is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea. … If you master the principles of sword-fencing, when you freely beat one man, you beat any man in the world. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. … The principle of strategy is having one thing, to know ten thousand things.
“A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.”
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation
Context: A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man's sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. One after another they complement one another, correct or overtake one another, contradict one another, too. If something brings creation to an end, it is not the victorious and illusory cry of the blinded artist: "I have said everything," but the death of the creator which closes his experiences and the book of his genius.
That effort, that superhuman consciousness are not necessarily apparent to the reader. There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle. But at least there is no true creation without a secret. To be true, a succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. But it is possible to conceive of another type of creator proceeding by juxtaposition. Their words may seem to be devoid of inter-relations, to a certain degree, they are contradictory. But viewed all together, they resume their natural grouping.
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Albert Camus 209
French author and journalist 1913–1960Related quotes
"The Captain", Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps
“Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.”
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 5
C. K. Prahalad, cited in: Simone P. Joyaux (2011), Strategic Fund Development, p. 7
The Celebration of Intellect (1861)
“The state shapes the society as much as the society shapes the state...”
Constitutional Choices (1985), The Nature of the Enterprise, The Futile Search for Legitimacy