Albert Camus Quotes
Philosopher
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
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.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Integrity has no need of rules.
Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
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.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
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.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.
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.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
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.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
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.
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
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.
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.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.
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.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.