Albert Camus Art Quotations

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

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.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Without freedom there is no art.

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters- all that matters, really- is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest- women, art, success- is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.

There is a metaphysical honour in ending the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.... War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. "Art and nothing but art", said Nietzsche, "we have art in order not to die of the truth."

Art does not tolerate reason.

To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!

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.

It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

A work of art is a confession.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

We have art in order not to die of life.

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.

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

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

Art and revolt will die only with the last man.

If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.