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.
-Albert Camus, “Three Interviews” in Lyrical and Critical Essays
The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.
- Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes
Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.- Albert Camus, The Stranger
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
- Franz Kafka, The Collected Aphorisms
Posts tagged albert camus.
The Dead…
Albert Camus, Algerian-born French philosopher-novelist and Nobel Laureate - died this day in 1960, aged 46, in a car accident…
“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” ― Albert Camus
(via 10 SEC READING: The book by Camus « Paulo Coelho’s Blog)
A journalist hounded the French writer, Albert Camus, asking him to explain his work in detail.
The author of The Plague refused:
“I write, and others can make of it what they will.”But the journalist refused to give in. One afternoon, he managed to find him in a café in Paris.
“Critics say you never take on truly profound themes,” said the journalist.
“I ask you now: if you had to write a book about society, would you accept the challenge?”“Of course,” replied Camus. “The book would be one hundred pages long. Ninety-nine would be blank, since there is nothing to be said.
“At the bottom of the hundredth page, I’d write: “man’s only duty is to love “.
(via teratomata)
