Camus In French Quotes & Sayings

Every wonderful thing in our world has a fight in its history: our rights, our good fortune, our happiness. All that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better. — Cory Doctorow

The French Revolution, by claiming to build history on the principle of absolute purity,
inaugurates modern times simultaneously with the era of formal morality. — Albert Camus

...the presiding judge told me in bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people...The lawyer put his hand on my wrist. I wasn't thinking about anything anymore. But the presiding judge asked me if I had anything to say. I thought about it. I said, 'No.' That's when they took me away. — Albert Camus

Compulsion: noun, mass noun; an ability possessed by certain Que Cum Virtute Judicium (Virts) to force someone to do something or create an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way — Alex Lane

My fans are pretty spot-on with their gifts. This girl that was super into baking had made this entire batch of cookies - there were one with a dandelion on it, one with a trailer, and some had my face. — Kacey Musgraves

In "The Myth of Sisyphus", his most important non-fiction work, Albert Camus suggested that if we believed what most people claim to be the purpose of life, we would feel compelled to commit suicide. If, however, we accept that life has no purpose we would be inclined to soldier on in a cussed, stoical manner like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up a hill only to see it roll down again. — Philip French

If you hold back on the emotions
if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them
you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely. — Mitch Albom

O, Men's vows are women's traitors! All good seeming, By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought Put on for villainy, not born where't grows, But worn a bait for ladies. — William Shakespeare

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical. — Bruce Chatwin

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down. — Adam Gopnik

Every generation feels it has the problems that will destroy it. That's because we can perceive them a long time before we have the ability to fix them. — Peter Diamandis

There are still psychologists who, in a basic misunderstanding, think that gestalt theory tends to underestimate the role of past experience. Gestalt theory tries to differentiate between and-summative aggregates, on the one hand, and gestalten, structures, on the other, both in sub-wholes and in the total field, and to develop appropriate scientific tools for investigating the latter. — Max Wertheimer

In the early days, when they thought this epidemic was much like other epidemics, religion held its ground. But once these people realized their instant peril, they gave their thoughts to pleasure. And all the hideous fears that stamp their faces in the daytime are transformed in the fiery, dusty nightfall into a sort of hectic exaltation, an unkempt freedom fevering in their blood. — Albert Camus

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus? — John Leonard

Rather than earn money, it was Thoreau's idea to reduce his wants so that he would not need to buy anything. As he went around preaching this ingenious idea, the shopkeepers of Concord hoped he would drop dead. — Richard Armour

I didn't look in Marie's direction. I didn't have time to, because the presiding judge told me in bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people... — Albert Camus

Albert Camus's 'La Peste' - 'The Plague' - had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from 'La Peste.' — Drew Gilpin Faust

A detailed
analysis of the most famous novels would show, in different perspectives each time, that the essence of
the novel lies in this perpetual alteration, always directed toward the same ends, that the artist makes in
his own experience. Far from being moral or even purely formal, this alteration aims, primarily, at unity
and thereby expresses a metaphysical need. The novel, on this level, is primarily an exercise of the
intelligence in the service of nostalgic or rebellious sensibilities. It would be possible to study
this quest for unity in the French analytical novel and in Melville, Balzac, Dostoievsky, or Tolstoy — Albert Camus

She told me that every other step was just for me.'
But that's only half of the dance,' I said.
Yeah,' my father said. 'She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain't healthy. — Sherman Alexie

The birthplace of 'Western' civilization is generally agreed to be Greece, and its birth date is generally agreed to be some time during the 6th century B.C.E. Obviously, there is not one single dramatic moment that definitively started the whole thing. — Brendan Myers

Don't rebel, but give God the opportunity to change your life and help you over the problems of youth, for they are many. — Billy Graham

The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine. — Albert Camus

On January 21, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion
of Louis XVI. It is certainly a crying scandal that the public assassination of a weak but goodhearted man has been
presented as a great moment in French history. That scaffold marked no climax - far from it. But the fact remains
that, by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the
secularization of our history and the disincarna-tion of the Christian God. Up to now God played a part in history
through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king.
Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles. — Albert Camus