Says Who?!

     Huxley: "After all, it is better to be a good bourgeois like the others than a bad bohemian, a false aristocrat, or a second-rate intellectual...."
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, p. 72.

     Decadence! Speeches about decadence! The third century B.C. was a "decadent" century for Greece. With Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus, and Hipparchus, it gave the world geometry, physics, astronomy, and trigonometry.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p.207.

     Gide dinner. Letters from young writers who ask if they should go on. Gide replies: "What? You can keep yourself from writing and you hesitate to do so?"
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 201.

     If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but the long and painful bringing forth. When the soul is ready, created by us and suffering, death comes along.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p. 224.

     S. Weil is right; it's not the human being that must be protected, but the possibilities within him. Moreover, she says, "one doesn't enter truth without having passed through one's own annihilation, without having lived at length in a state of total and extreme humiliation." The misfortune (a chance can wipe me out) is that state of humiliation, not anguish. And again: "The spirit of justice and the spirit of truth are one."
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p. 265.

....The kind of faith I had in my predestination as a poet made me welcome whatever happened to me and look at everything I met upon my path as if it had been sent providentially and had been singled out by some divine choice on purpose to win me over, assist and perfect me. I still retain something of this disposition, and in the worst adversities instinctively look round for what may amuse or instruct me. I even push the amor fati so far that I cannot bring myself to believe that any other event, any other issue, would have suited me better. Not only do I consider whatever is is good, I consider it best.
— André Gide, If It Die... (Gide's autobiography), p. 211.