Albert Camus - The Rebel (1951)

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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
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
What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

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

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
Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.

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

Albert Camus
The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

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
The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.

Albert Camus
Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

Albert Camus
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

Albert Camus
Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.

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
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Albert Camus
Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

Albert Camus
If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.

Albert Camus
In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

Albert Camus
We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.

Albert Camus
If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

Albert Camus
Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

Albert Camus
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all - he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.

Albert Camus
In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.

Albert Camus