“If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation, p. 18
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Albert Camus 209
French author and journalist 1913–1960Related quotes

1935 speech at Barber's Hall, London, included in Round the World for Birth Control (1937) edited by the Birth Control International Information Centre

As quoted in The New York Times (27 May 1984)

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, The Independence of Psychohistory, p. 85.

Parker, Hitler's Warrior, chapter 19, citing Peiper to Karl Wortmann, November 28, 1974 in note 27.
Why Do Religions Teach Love and Yet Cause So Much War?
Context: In my previous column I didn't spell out, or really indicate what an "integral approach" to spirituality would include. Many readers naturally assumed that this was simply another version of "universalism" — the belief that there are certain truths contained in all the world's religions. But the integral approach emphatically does not make that suggestion. Other readers maintained that I was offering a version of the "perennial philosophy" espoused by Aldous Huxley or Huston Smith. Does the integral approach believe that all religions are saying essentially the same thing from a different perspective? No, almost the opposite.
Yet the integral approach does claim to be able to "unite," in some sense, the world's great spiritual traditions, which is what has caused much of the interest in this approach. If humanity is ever to cease its swarming hostilities and be united in one family, without squashing the significant and important differences among us, then something like an integral approach seems the only way. Until that time, religions will continue to brutally divide humanity, as they have throughout history, and not unite, as they must if they are to be a help, not a hindrance, to tomorrow's existence.