I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Albert Camus

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same seashore.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.



A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

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.

The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.