Education Quote by Albert Camus

Camus isn’t lamenting that people have become ignorant; he’s warning that they’ve become over-informed and under-oriented. The sting in "Knowledge has stretched itself" is that knowledge here behaves like an elastic band pulled past usefulness. It doesn’t snap into clarity; it thins into abstraction, leaving "neither the world nor our intelligence" with traction. That choice of "foot-hold" is quietly brutal: it’s not a debate about truth claims, it’s a body problem, an existential slip. Modernity has made thinking frictionless in the worst way.

The subtext is a postwar diagnosis. Camus writes in a Europe where inherited moral languages have been discredited by mechanized slaughter, bureaucratic complicity, and the spectacle of ideology claiming scientific inevitability. When he says "It is a fact", he’s mimicking the authority of the very rationalism he’s interrogating, using its confident cadence to announce a crisis of confidence. That irony is Camus at his sharpest: the age that worships facts ends up unable to live inside them.

"Disarray" matters, too. It’s not mere skepticism; it’s psychic clutter. Nihilism, for Camus, isn’t a fashionable pose but a symptom: the gap between our hunger for meaning and a world that refuses to provide it on demand. The intent isn’t despair as an endpoint; it’s provocation. If the old footholds are gone, the task becomes building new ones through lucid revolt, solidarity, and chosen limits rather than comforting metaphysics.