Notebooks, 1935-1951 Quotes

“You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them … they could perceive what they have made of us.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity.

Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy.

The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“The first thing to do is to keep silent – to abolish audiences and learn to be your own judge. To keep a balance between active concern for the body and an attentive awareness of being alive. To abandon all claims and devote yourself to achieving two kinds of freedom: freedom from money, and freedom from your own vanity and cowardice. To have rules and stick to them. Two years is not too long to spend thinking about one single point. You must wipe out all earlier stages, and concentrate all your strength on forgetting nothing and learning patiently.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Living with one’s passions amounts to living with one’s sufferings, which are the counterpoise, the corrective, the balance and the price. When a man has learned — and not on paper — how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, the illusions that others may share, then he has little left to learn.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. — Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942 (Paragon House Publishers, 1991)”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“What am I doing here, what is the point of these smiles and gestures? My home is neither here nor elsewhere. And the world has become merely unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. Foreign - who can know what this word means?”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking the world to give him.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Smiling despair. No solution, but constantly exercising an authority over myself that I know is useless. The essential thing is not to lose oneself, and not to lose that part of oneself that lies sleeping in the world.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Start by looking for what is valid in every human being.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Three years to make a book, five lines to ridicule it, and the quotations wrong.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“The true artist stands midway between what he imagines and what he does. He is the one who is 'capable of.' he could be what he describes, experience what he writes. The mere act would limit him; he would be the one who has acted.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Neste momento há lugares longínquos onde o mar é rosa na hora do crepúsculo.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

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― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

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― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“To write the story of a modern man who was cured of painful contradictions by long and unceasing contemplation of the landscape.

***
Illness is a monastery with its own rules, its own asceticism, its own silence and its own insights.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“I must start to build again after this long period of anguish and despair. Keep silent—and have confidence in myself.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“The only liberty possible is a liberty as regards death. The really free man is the one who, accepting death as it is, at the same time accepts its consequences—that is to say, the abolition of all life's traditional values. Ivan Karamazov's "Everything is permitted" is the only expression there is of a coherent liberty. And we must follow out all the consequences of his remark.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Întotdeauna preferăm nu omul, ci ideea pe care ne-o facem despre el”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Настоящая забота о будущем состоит в том, чтобы отдать все настоящему.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Nors kartą pamatęs,kaip nušvinta laime mylimo žmogaus veidas,suvoki,kad žmogui nėra kito pašaukimo,kaip tik įžiebti tą šviesą jį supančiųjų veiduose..ir mintis,kad vien tuo,jog gyveni,atneši nelaimę ir naktį į sutiktųjų širdis,darosi nebepakeliama”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951