Albert Camus - Day Quotes

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In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one's cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That's why life is difficult to live.

Albert Camus
Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.

Albert Camus
Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

Albert Camus
Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.

Albert Camus
Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.

Albert Camus
To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

Albert Camus
I'll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don't wait for the last judgement. It takes place every day.

Albert Camus
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

Albert Camus
I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Albert Camus
No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

Albert Camus
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Albert Camus
Thus, 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
Freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

Albert Camus
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

Albert Camus
Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.

Albert Camus
I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

Albert Camus
At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she—or he—would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.

Albert Camus
For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.

Albert Camus
In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.

Albert Camus
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Albert Camus
In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

Albert Camus
I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.

Albert Camus
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

Albert Camus
There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man's courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.

Albert Camus
Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.

Albert Camus