Camus Quotes

Camus believed in dialogue and diplomacy, and enlisted his work as a philosopher to the need to find nonviolent solutions, whereas Sartre called for violent conflicts and justified terror.

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

Satre found atheism 'cruel', Camus 'dreadful', and Nietzsche 'maddening'. Atheists who consistently try to live without God tend to commit suicide or go insane. Those who are inconsistent live on the ethical or aesthetic shadow of Christian truth while they deny the reality that made the shadow.

This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.

I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.

Camus says in 'The Stranger' that reason is the enemy of imagination. Sometimes you have to put reason aside and make something beautiful.

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

About one month before he was killed, when asked by David Frost how his obituary should read: Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

Then I had not read Camu.

The boy I loved didn't know I existed. Then again, he was obsessed with Camus, so he didn't know if any of us existed.

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.

I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books.

I'd almost say hope isn't what it used to be. It's very difficult today to be a teacher. I speak to children. And tell them, look, no matter what, you must have hope. You must. When I invoke Camus, who said when there is no hope, you must invent hope. . .hope is something that is not what God gives us. It's like peace. It's a gift that one can give to one another. Only another person can push me to despair. And only another person can push me to hope. Its my choice.

The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself.

A friend of mine that I was in a band with started me on Kafka, which in turn led to Camus and Sartre.

Albert Camus's 'La Peste' - 'The Plague' - had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from 'La Peste.'

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.