Quotes from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“أصرخ قائلاً إنني لا أؤمن بشيء , وأن كل شيء عبث .”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“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 from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“The final conclusion of the absurdist protest is, in fact, the rejection of suicide and persistence in that hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silence of the universe.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Le seul moyen d'affronter un monde sans liberté est de devenir si absolument libre qu'on fasse de sa propre existence un acte de révolte. ”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to
realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers
from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single
man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in the
realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude.
It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel—therefore we exist.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“The Byronic
hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid,
his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and
destructive action. To love someone whom one will never see again is to give a cry of exultation as one
perishes in the flames of passion. One lives only in and for the moment, in order to achieve "the brief and
vivid union of a tempestuous heart united to the tempest" (lermontov). The threat of mortality which
hangs over us makes everything abortive. Only the cry of anguish can bring us to life; exaltation takes the
place of truth. To this extent the apocalypse becomes an absolute value in which everything is
confounded—love and death, conscience and culpability. In a chaotic universe no other life exists but that
of the abyss where, according to Alfred Le Poittevin, human beings come "trembling with rage and
exulting in
their crimes" to curse the Creator.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“They did not know; nor did they know that the negation of everything is in itself a form of servitude and
that real freedom is an inner submission to a value which defies history and its successes.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“… man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified… Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonable desire and claims to give life a form it does not have.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Become so very free that your whole existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the
whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and of creation. The slave
protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel
protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man. The rebel slave affirms that there is
something in him that will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel
declares that he is frustrated by the universe. For both of them, it is not only a question of pure and simple
negation. In both cases, in fact, we find a value judgment in the name of which the rebel refuses to
approve the condition in which he finds himself.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“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 sea-shore.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“That is the answer to the question which is always being asked: why has
the revolutionary movement identified itself with materialism rather than with idealism? Because to
conquer God, to make Him a slave, amounts to abolishing the transcendence that kept the former masters
in power and to preparing, with the ascendancy of the new tyrants, the advent of the man-king. When
poverty is abolished, when the contradictions of history are resolved, "the real god, the human god, will
be the State." Then homo homini lupus becomes homo homini deus. This concept is at the root of the
contemporary world.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

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“Come tutte le biblioteche, era chiusa al pubblica e sottoposta all’amministrazione centrale tedesca, ma conservava il vecchio personale, il quale, pur avendo stipendi da fame, rimaneva al proprio posto per un patriottismo aziendale – i bibliotecari d’altronde costituiscono una razza speciale, capace di nutrirsi del solo amore per i propri libri.”
― Czesław Miłosz, quote from Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition

“A born king is a very rare being.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quote from The Social Contract

“Sylphid was beginning to play professionally, and she was subbing as second harpist in the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. She was called pretty regularly, once or twice a week, and she’d also got a job playing at a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties on Friday night. Ira would drive her from the Village up to the restaurant with her harp and then go and pick her and the harp up when she finished. He had the station wagon, and he’d pull up in front of the house and go inside and have to carry it down the stairs. The harp is in its felt cover, and Ira puts one hand on the column and one hand in the sound hole at the back and he lifts it up, lays the harp on a mattress they keep in the station wagon, and drives Sylphid and the harp uptown to the restaurant. At the restaurant he takes the harp out of the car and, big radio star that he is, he carries it inside. At ten-thirty, when the restaurant is finished serving dinner and Sylphid’s ready to come back to the Village, he goes around to pick her up and the whole operation is repeated. Every Friday. He hated the physical imposition that it was—those things weigh about eighty pounds—but he did it. I remember that in the hospital, when he had cracked up, he said to me, ‘She married me to carry her daughter’s harp! That’s why the woman married me! To haul that fucking harp!’ “On those Friday night trips, Ira found he could talk to Sylphid in ways he couldn’t when Eve was around. He’d ask her about being a movie star’s child. He’d say to her, ‘When you were a little girl, when did it dawn on you that something was up, that this wasn’t the way everyone grew up?’ She told him it was when the tour buses went up and down their street in Beverly Hills. She said she never saw her parents’ movies until she was a teenager. Her parents were trying to keep her normal and so they downplayed those movies around the house. Even the rich kid’s life in Beverly Hills with the other movie stars’ kids seemed normal enough until the tour buses stopped in front of her house and she could hear the tour guide saying, ‘This is Carlton Pennington’s house, where he lives with his wife, Eve Frame.’ “She told him about the production that birthday parties were for the movie stars’ kids—clowns, magicians, ponies, puppet shows, and every child attended by a nanny in a white nurse’s uniform. At the dining table, behind every child would be a nanny. The Penningtons had their own screening room and they ran movies. Kids would come over. Fifteen, twenty kids.”
― Philip Roth, quote from I Married a Communist

“Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain.
Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion.
The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror.
But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with woman you love.
Well, what remains in your skin ,your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman.
In other words, auto suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don't know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you'd kill him.
But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it's possible to look at him without horror; and believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you'd approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you have reached my degree of perfection, you'd actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he's a good chap.
In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“Es una verdad universal que cuando una mujer dice que ha estado pensando, el hombre tiene que preocuparse”
― Maya Banks, quote from Never Love a Highlander

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