Albert Camus - The Rebel (1951)

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Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

Albert Camus
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Albert Camus
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Albert Camus
As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla. Actually his god was an argument at a political meeting and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of speeches.

Albert Camus
A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.

Albert Camus
In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

Albert Camus
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Albert Camus
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

Albert Camus
The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.

Albert Camus
Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.

Albert Camus
Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.

Albert Camus
To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.

Albert Camus
Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

Albert Camus
A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

Albert Camus
We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

Albert Camus
Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

Albert Camus
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

Albert Camus
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

Albert Camus
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

Albert Camus
Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

Albert Camus
The real saint, Baudelaire pretends to think, is he who flogs and kills people for their own good. His argument will be heard. A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.

Albert Camus
Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

Albert Camus
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.

Albert Camus
Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

Albert Camus
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Albert Camus
More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Albert Camus
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

Albert Camus
The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.

Albert Camus
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

Albert Camus
For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

Albert Camus