Men famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
-- Albert Camus -
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
-- Albert Camus -
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
-- Albert Camus -
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
-- Albert Camus -
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
-- Albert Camus -
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
-- Albert Camus -
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
-- Albert Camus -
Ah cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They are They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!
-- Albert Camus -
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
-- Albert Camus -
Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
-- Albert Camus -
Art and revolt will die only with the last man.
-- Albert Camus -
A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
-- Albert Camus -
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.
-- Albert Camus -
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
-- Albert Camus -
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
-- Albert Camus -
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
-- Albert Camus -
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
-- Albert Camus -
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
-- Albert Camus -
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
-- Albert Camus -
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
-- Albert Camus -
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
-- Albert Camus -
There are more things to admire in men then to despise.
-- Albert Camus -
You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
-- Albert Camus -
One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
-- Albert Camus -
He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.
-- Albert Camus -
Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
-- Albert Camus -
Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth-with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its goodness.
-- Albert Camus -
This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
-- Albert Camus -
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.
-- Albert Camus -
Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.
-- Albert Camus -
What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.
-- Albert Camus -
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.
-- Albert Camus -
How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?
-- Albert Camus -
Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
-- Albert Camus -
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.
-- Albert Camus -
The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.
-- Albert Camus -
The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
-- Albert Camus -
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
-- Albert Camus -
I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.
-- Albert Camus -
All healthy men have thought of their own suicide
-- Albert Camus -
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
-- Albert Camus -
In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.
-- 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 -
A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.
-- Albert Camus -
There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.
-- 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 -
The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.
-- Albert Camus -
There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.
-- Albert Camus -
Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.
-- Albert Camus -
Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
-- Albert Camus -
My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.
-- Albert Camus -
In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.
-- Albert Camus -
For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
-- Albert Camus -
Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.
-- Albert Camus -
Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.
-- Albert Camus -
Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.
-- Albert Camus -
God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.
-- Albert Camus -
You know, [women] do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.
-- Albert Camus -
I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?
-- Albert Camus -
The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.
-- Albert Camus -
I don't want to represent man as he is, but only as he might be.
-- Albert Camus -
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
-- Albert Camus -
When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
-- Albert Camus -
Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
-- Albert Camus -
What's natural is the microbe. All the rest-heath, integrity, purity (if you like)-is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.
-- Albert Camus -
So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.
-- Albert Camus -
For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.
-- Albert Camus -
There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.
-- 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 -
When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.
-- Albert Camus -
The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.
-- Albert Camus -
The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth , but it will be ruled over by men a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Cassars, because they were the first to understand and later, with time, by all men.
-- 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 -
Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.
-- Albert Camus -
Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.
-- Albert Camus -
In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.
-- Albert Camus -
If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.
-- Albert Camus -
A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
-- Albert Camus -
On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
-- Albert Camus -
I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one
-- Albert Camus -
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.
-- Albert Camus -
maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occured to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. [...] Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.
-- Albert Camus -
Thus, I always began by assuming the worst; my appeal was dismissed. That meant, of course, I was to die. Sooner than others, obviously. 'But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.' And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-- since, in either case, other men will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.
-- Albert Camus -
A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.
-- Albert Camus -
This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.
-- Albert Camus -
What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?
-- Albert Camus -
...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.
-- Albert Camus -
Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
-- Albert Camus -
The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it
-- Albert Camus -
You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.
-- Albert Camus -
Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses...
-- Albert Camus -
For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men.
-- Albert Claude -
If we examine the accomplishments of man in his most advanced endeavors, in theory and in practice, we find that the cell has done all this long before him, with greater resourcefulness and much greater efficiency.
-- Albert Claude -
No doubt, man will continue to weigh and to measure, watch himself grow, and his Universe around him and with him, according to the ever growing powers of his tools.
-- Albert Claude -
Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.
-- Albert Claude -
Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored Information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?
-- Albert Claude -
You will never have to talk religion to anyone; men will see it talking in your life! You will radiate a positive influence at all times, which will in turn bring you happiness and health in good measure.
-- Albert E Cliffe