Albert Camus Order Quotations

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

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

The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically , expresses an aspiration for order .

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself.

For instance, I never complained that my birthday was overlooked; people were even surprised, with a touch of admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself... Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.

In order to exist, man must rebel.

Knowing what [Christ] knew , knowing all about mankind--ah! who would have thought that the crime is not so much to make others die, but to die oneself--confronted day and night with his innocent crime, it became too difficult to go on. It was better to get it over with, to not defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to have survived, and to go elsewhere, where, perhaps, he would be supported.

What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?

I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that i finally obey.

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.

We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

We have art in order not to die of life.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

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.