Albert Camus

"Its better to bet on this life than on the next."

"It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about."

"It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartres hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of mans signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it."

"Toute idée fausse finit dans le sang, mais il sagit toujours du sang des autres. Cest ce qui explique que certains de nos philosophes se sentent à laise pour dire nimporte quoi."

"Simone Weil, je le sais encore maintenant, est le seul grand esprit de notre temps et je souhaite que ceux qui le reconnaissent en reçoivent assez de modestie pour ne pas essayer dannexer ce témoignage bouleversant. Pour moi, je serais comblé si lon pouvait dire quà ma place, et avec les faibles moyens dont je dispose, jai servi à faire connaître et à répandre son oeuvre dont on na pas encore mesuré tout le retentissement."

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you dont help us, who else in the world can help us do this?"

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

"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."

"With rebellion, awareness is born."

"Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it."

"Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower."

"We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printers ink."