The collection / 410 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

410 results · Page 5 of 18Play this collection ▷

01c. 1936 AD

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 / quote

↗

02c. 1936 AD

You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

03c. 1936 AD

In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

04c. 1936 AD

…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 / quote

↗

05c. 1936 AD

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 / quote

↗

06c. 1936 AD

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 / quote

↗

07c. 1936 AD

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 / quote

↗

08c. 1936 AD

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 / quote

↗

09c. 1936 AD

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 / quote

↗

10c. 1936 AD

You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

11c. 1936 AD

Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

12c. 1936 AD

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

13c. 1936 AD

Don't let them tell us stories

Albert Camus / quote

↗

14c. 1936 AD

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

15c. 1936 AD

How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

16c. 1936 AD

The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

17c. 1936 AD

Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

18c. 1936 AD

For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

19c. 1936 AD

We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

20c. 1936 AD

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

21c. 1936 AD

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

22c. 1936 AD

There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

23c. 1936 AD

My soul’s a burden to me, I’ve had enough of it. I’m eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don’t belong here.

Albert Camus / quote

↗

24c. 1936 AD

The cats sleep for days at a time and make love from the first star until dawn. Their pleasures are fierce, and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.

Albert Camus / quote

↗