译文札记（673）：Albert Camus quote

 

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest -- whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories -- comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.

---- An Absurd Reasoning

 

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

---- The Plague

 

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.

---- Resistance, Rebellion and Death

 

In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.

---- Between Hell and Reason

 

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

---- Between Hell and Reason

 

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

---- attributed, Words of Wisdom: Albert Camus

 

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without ever having asked a clear question.

---- The Fall

 

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.

---- The Rebel

 

There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.

---- letter, Jun. 18, 1938

 

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

---- The Fall

 

Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?

---- Caligula

 

Who would dare speak the word "happiness" in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? And who could say that they are wrong? What would justice be without the chance for happiness? What purpose would freedom serve, if we had to live in misery?

---- Combat, Dec. 22, 1944

 

If I think that happiness is possible, I know all too well its hidden nature--and by what wretched paradox, instead of being an excess that would elevate us in dignity, it is a numbness we are only aware of afterward.

---- letter, Jun. 18, 1938

 

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradictions; therefore it destroys freedom.

---- The Rebel

 

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle.

---- attributed, Weird Tales, Summer 2011

 

Man is the only animal that refuses to be what he is.

---- The Rebel

 

If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus

 

Live to the point of tears.

---- Notebooks

 

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

---- A Happy Death

 

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

---- The Stranger

 

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 printer's ink.

---- "Helen's Exile"

 

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

---- "After Hiroshima: Between Hell and Reason," Combat, Aug. 8, 1945

 

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

---- The Rebel

 

Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

---- The Fall

 

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus

 

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

---- attributed, Visions from Earth

 

The realization that life is absurd and 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.

---- attributed, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd

 

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

---- The Plague

 

Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

---- The Fall

 

A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus

 

Having money is a way of being free of money.

---- A Happy Death

 

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus

 

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

---- Happy Death

 

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

---- attributed, Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

 

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

---- The Rebel

 

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

---- Notebooks

 

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

---- The Fall

 

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.

---- The First Man

 

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

---- attributed, Albert Camus: The Invincible Summer

 

Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

---- The Fall

 

This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

 

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

---- "Helen's Exile"

 

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.

---- The Rebel

 

Subject-painting isolates, in both time and space, an action that normally would become lost in another action. Thus the painter arrives at a point of stabilization. The really great creative artists are those who, like Piero della Francesca, give the impression that the stabilization has only just taken place, that the projection machine has suddenly stopped dead. All their subjects give the impression that, by some miracle of art, they continue to live, while ceasing to be mortal.

---- The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

 

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

---- attributed, The Paradox of Choice

 

When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

---- The Plague

 

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

---- attributed, 2012: Waking of the Prophets

 

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

---- attributed, The Best Liberal Quotes Ever

 

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

 

Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

---- The Fall

 

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

---- The Stranger

 

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus

 

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.

---- "Three Interviews," Lyrical and Critical Essays

 

The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art, "is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values.

---- The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

 

A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

---- "The Failing of Prophecy"

 

I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

---- The Stranger

 

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

---- The Plague

 

Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus

 

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

---- attributed, The Quotable Intellectual

 

I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.

---- The Stranger

 

With rebellion, awareness is born.

---- attributed, The Estranged God

 

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

---- The Rebel

 

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents.

 

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.

---- "The Absurd Man", The Myth of Sisyphus

 

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

---- Notebooks, 1935-1951

 

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

---- Notebooks 1951-1959

 

It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

 

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

---- "Helen's Exile", The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

 

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

---- The Rebel

 

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

---- Return to Tipasa

 

Integrity has no need of rules.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays

 

To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that 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 one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

 

He had always followed his routine, but now he had difficulty painting, even in moments of solitude. He would spend these moments looking at the sky. He had always been distracted and absorbed, but now he became a dreamer. He would think about painting, about his vocation, instead of painting. "I love to paint," he still said to himself, and the hand holding the paintbrush would hang at his side as he listened to a distant radio.

---- Exile and the Kingdom

 

Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

---- Notebooks 1951-1959

 

There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.

---- "Between Yes and No", World Review, March 1950

 

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality.

---- American Journals

 

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

---- Happy Death

 

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

---- The Plague

 

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus

 

I don't want to be a genius--I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

---- Notebooks

 

There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.

---- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays