Albert Camus
Biography
Albert Camus was a French Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was a key philosopher of the 20th-century and his most famous work is the novel *L'Étranger* (*The Stranger*). In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was a group opposed to some tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature - after Rudyard Kipling - when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award. He is often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy that he was associated with during his own lifetime, but Camus himself rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…"
Quotes from Albert Camus
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
1027
"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
1028
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
1029
"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."
1030
"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
1031
"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
1032
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
1033
"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
1034
"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
1035
"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"
1036
"No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people."
1037
"Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."
1038
"The society based on production is only productive, not creative."
1039
"Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic."
1040
"We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves."
1041
"A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad."
1042
"Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies."
1043
"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."
1044
"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better."
1045
"To be happy we must not be too concerned with others."
1046
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."
1047
"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
1048
"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."
1049
"Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself."
1050
"Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road."
1051
"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."
1052
"Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it."
1053