Resistance, Rebellion and Death Quotes

“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, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Despite men's suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of men isolated with their fate.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death--these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is true that freedom, when it is made up principally of privileges, insults labor and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. And the moment each of us tries to give freedom's duties precedence over its privileges, freedom joins together labor and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labor also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation. ”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world—in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. 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 deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yeild nothing on the plane of freedom”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Words always take on the color of the deeds or sacrifices they evoke.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“The hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments; our comrades will be more patient than the executioners and more numerous than the bullets.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“For their heroism was that they had to conquer themselves first.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“What is there more real, for instance, in our universe than a man's life, and how can we hope to preserve it better than a realistic film? But under what conditions is such a film possible? Under purely imaginary conditions. We should have to presuppose, in fact, an ideal camera focused on the man day and night and constantly registering his every move. The very projection of such a film would last a lifetime and could be seen only by an audience of people willing to waste their lives in watching someone else's life in great detail. Even under such conditions, such an unimaginable film would not be realistic for the simple reason that the reality of a man's life is not limited to the spot in which he happens to be. It lies also in other lives that give shape to his--lives of people he loves, to begin with, which would have to be filmed too, and also lives of unknown people, influential and insignificant, fellow citizens, policemen, professors, invisible comrades from the mines and foundries, diplomats and dictators, religious reformers, artists who create myths that are decisive for out conduct--humble representatives, in short, of the sovereign chance that dominates the most routine existences. Consequently, there is but one possible realistic film: one that is constantly shown us by an invisible camera on the world's screen. The only realistic artist, then, is God, if he exists. All other artists are, ipso facto, unfaithful to reality.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Yesterday it was love. Today the great passions of unity and liberty disrupt the world. yesterday love led to individual death. Today collective passions make us run the risk of universal destruction. Today, just as yesterday, art wants to save from death a living image of our passions and our sufferings.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“The people are under arms tonight because they hope for justice for tomorrow, Some go about saying that it is not worthwhile…But this is because they vaguely sense that this insurrection threatens many things thar would continue to stand if all took place otherwise.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“A city deprived of everything, devoid of light and devoid of heat, starved, and still not crushed.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history…Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means which cannot be excused.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world. 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, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays

“No one can hope that men who have fought in silence for four years and are now fighting all day long in the din of bombs and the crackle of guns will agree to the return of the forces of surrender and injustice under any circumstances. No one can expect that these men will again accept doing what the best and purest did for twenty-five years—that is, loving their country and silently despising her leaders,”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Yes, their reasons are overwhelming. They are as big as hope and as deep as revolt. They are the reasons of the future for a country that others tried so long to limit to the gloomy rumination of her past.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays