and i was just looking through a book that has kept me company for a few years now: Notebooks 1935-1942. These notebooks belonged to Albert Camus, writer and philosopher. I have never read a book by Camus, but for several summers in a row, during college, I picked the notebooks up wherever I'd left off the summer before. And it always seemed that wherever I was in the book, what Camus had to say always jived so well with where I was in life. The notebooks are full of quotations that make one feel, how do i say...bummed, or lost, or, no... inspired. in my mind, Camus points out how unaware we can be, how off-kilter we can be, what shallow fucks we can be, what little retards we can be - that i can rise higher and maybe one day meet my potential. on the other hand, camus seems to suggest we not think too hard about what we're doing, that we just go with it.
5 QUOTES from CAMUS
1.) "The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is seeking this world to give him."
2.) "We haven't the time to be ourselves. All we have time for is happiness."
3.) "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."
4.) "The most dangerous temptation: to be like nothing at all."
5.) "The demand for happiness and the patient quest for it. We need not banish our melancholy, but we must destroy our taste for difficult and fatal things. Be happy with our friends, in harmony with the world, and earn our happiness by following a path which nevertheless leads to death.
'You will tremble before death.'
'Yes, but I shall leave nothing unfulfilled in my mission, which is to live.' Don't give way to conformity and to office hours. Don't give up. Never give up - always demand more. But stay lucid, even during office hours. As soon as we are alone in its presence, strive after the nakedness into which the world rejects us. But above all, in order to be, never try to seem."
1.) "The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is seeking this world to give him."
2.) "We haven't the time to be ourselves. All we have time for is happiness."
3.) "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."
4.) "The most dangerous temptation: to be like nothing at all."
5.) "The demand for happiness and the patient quest for it. We need not banish our melancholy, but we must destroy our taste for difficult and fatal things. Be happy with our friends, in harmony with the world, and earn our happiness by following a path which nevertheless leads to death.
'You will tremble before death.'
'Yes, but I shall leave nothing unfulfilled in my mission, which is to live.' Don't give way to conformity and to office hours. Don't give up. Never give up - always demand more. But stay lucid, even during office hours. As soon as we are alone in its presence, strive after the nakedness into which the world rejects us. But above all, in order to be, never try to seem."
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
