"Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road."
In his writings and in his banquet speech, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus pondered the great fundamental questions of life. In his 1957 banquet speech, Camus describes the connection he has to humanity. Being awarded the literature prize caused Camus to contemplate his relationship to humankind.
In the banquet speech, Camus also mentioned the duties of a writer: “the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.” To Camus, a writer’s duty is not only to write about history but also to tell stories of the underprivileged.
Because of his modest upbringing and tuberculous diagnosis, Camus searched for moral order with an intense rationality. This is reflected in his writing and his association with the absurdist philosophical movement.
In a speech, Anders Österling, former Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, said that Camus’s “serious, austere meditations” worked to find justice possible in an unjust world.
Camus received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.”