France/Algeria, 1913–1960
Albert Camus
French-Algerian novelist and philosopher of the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus asks how to live well in a universe without inherent meaning.
Albert Camus in 43 lines
Every Albert Camus passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.”
“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”
“We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.”
“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.”
“One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.”
“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
“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.”
“Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.”
“Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.”
“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
“It's better to bet on this life than on the next.”
“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”
“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.”
“Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.”
“The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.”
“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
“He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”
“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
“I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.”
“I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.”
“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
“Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.”
“Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.”
“Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.”
“What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.”
“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”
“Great novelists are philosopher novelists — that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.”
“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”
“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”
“I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.”
“Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.”
“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
“To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.”
“The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.”
“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden.”
“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.”
“To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.”
“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
Where Albert Camus lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one.
You are treating growth as a responsibility, not a mood. The risk is worshiping difficulty for its own sake.
You are good at something you no longer love.
You are refusing to be owned by what once made you impressive. The danger is throwing away discipline because boredom feels profound.
The evidence is discouraging, but hope keeps returning.
You are separating meaning from prediction. The danger is becoming proud of hopelessness.
You are deciding whether to bring someone into this world.
You are admitting the decision exceeds what deliberation can settle. The danger is calling avoidance a leap.
Your days are steady, productive, and increasingly identical.
You are buying experience at the cost of efficiency. The cost is disruption that produces stories and not much else.
Lessons that quote Albert Camus
- Sartre, Camus & the Absurd — Freedom, bad faith, and revolt
Reading Albert Camus today
Albert Camus wrote in 1913–1960, from France/Algeria — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Albert Camus is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 43 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
- Henry David Thoreau — USA, 1817–1862
Argues the same cases
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Buddha, Epictetus, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill take positions on the same dilemmas as Albert Camus, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.