The Quotable Nobel Laureate Albert Camus

[Starchild Indigo]

The French Algerian Literary Noble Prize winner Albert Camus was known to stretch his words and ideas between great extremes. The extreme sometimes was grotesque horror and at other times seductive beauty. His ability to combine and balance the two has made his voice even in death one of the most cherished of any time. These are his words offered in honor of this time just a couple of days before the Nobel Prize for Literature announcement later this week:

“To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.”

"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door. "

“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason. “

“I know of only one duty, and that is to love.”

“We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.”

“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. “

“A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

“Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

All quotes from works by Albert Camus.

SI