Albert Camus Quotes on Knowledge
Albert Camus was a 20th-century French philosopher, novelist, and journalist, born in French Algeria, who developed the philosophical position known as absurdism. This page collects quotes attributed to Albert Camus on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d'abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage.”
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage. A Happy Death (written 1938), first published as La mort heureuse (1971), as translated by Richard Howard (1972) -
“Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre , published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5; reprinted in Selected Essays and Notebooks , translated and edited by Philip Thody”
A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret f -
“Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre , published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5; also quoted in Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002) by Avi Sagi, p. 43”
It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty , love , or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reason -
“We have exiled beauty ; the Greeks took up arms for her.”
Helen's Exile" (1948)