ALBERT CAMUS

On certain mornings, as we turn a corner,
an exquisite dew falls on our heart
and then vanishes.

But the freshness lingers,
and this, always,
is what the heart needs.

The earth must have risen
in just such a light,
the morning the world was born.

ALBERT CAMUS

Be careful. When a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Stranger

Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.

What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that?

Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Plague

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

ALBERT CAMUS

Be careful. When a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Stranger

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.

Reading

Albert Camus
LYRICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS

Edited and with Notes by Philip Thody
Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy

ALBERT CAMUS
"The Sea Close By"

I realized that day that there are two truths, and that one of them ought never to be uttered

ALBERT CAMUS
The Rebel

Industrial society will open the way to a new civilization only by restoring to the worker the dignity of a creator; in other words, by making him apply his interest and his intelligence as much to the work itself as to what it produces. The type of civilization that is inevitable will not be able to separate, among classes as well as among individuals, the worker from the creator; any more than artistic creation dreams of separating form and substance, history and the mind. In this way it will bestow on everyone the dignity that rebellion affirms.

It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous for the shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare. Shakespeare without the shoemaker serves as an excuse for tyranny. The shoemaker without Shakespeare is absorbed by tyranny when he does not contribute to its propagation.

ALBERT CAMUS
A Happy Death

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Rebel

What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right. The rebel says yes and no simultaneously In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself.

-

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Let not the gendered language detract or distract from the lucidity of Camus’s wisdom, for it is a function of his era

ALBERT CAMUS

Summer

____________________

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Plague

____________________

In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.

ALBERT CAMUS
A Happy Death

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

ALBERT CAMUS

The Plague

____________________

Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Plague

____________________

At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. 

Naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. 

In a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

ALBERT CAMUS

The Plague

____________________

In this, too, the reaction of the public was slower than might have been expected. Thus the bare statement that three hundred and two deaths had taken place in the third week of plague failed to strike their imagination.

ALBERT CAMUS

A Happy Death

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory. Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Fall

____________________

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fucked and read the news. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

ALBERT CAMUS

A Happy Death

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Like that sky. It's rain and sun both, noon and midnight. I think of the lips I've kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I'm all those things at once. I'm sure there are times when you wouldn't even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness—I can't say it.