Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day...

Contemporary thought & modern Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Sunset at the Port, oil on canvas

Among the great intellectuals of the 20th century...

Albert Camus
Aphorisms

• I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.
• I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
• If there is sin against life, it consists... in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
• In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
• A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
• A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
• A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
• 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 taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
• Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
• After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
• After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
• Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
• Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
• 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.
• All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
• An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
• As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
• At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
• At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
• Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
• 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.
• Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
• But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
• By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
• Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
• Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
• Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
• Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
• Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
• Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
• Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
• Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
• For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
• For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
• Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
• He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
• How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
• How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
• I know of only one duty, and that is to love.