Albert Camus - The Rebel (1951)

84 Sourced Quotes

View all Albert Camus Quotes
A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.

Albert Camus
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

Albert Camus
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the State.

Albert Camus
When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

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

Albert Camus
If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda, that does not condemn their entire philosophy. But it does lead to the suspicion that one aspect of their thought, or of their logic, can lead to these appalling conclusions.

Albert Camus
Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to the present.

Albert Camus
Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

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
The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.

Albert Camus
In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time.

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
If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

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

Albert Camus
Kings were put to death long before 21 January, 1793, and before the regicides of the nineteenth century. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interesting in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.

Albert Camus
Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

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
The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.

Albert Camus
Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.

Albert Camus
The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.

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
Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

Albert Camus