Quotes by Albert Camus
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If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.

I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.

I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.

He was one
of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good
feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a
capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

Art and revolt will die only with the last man.

We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.

Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone ... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.

In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.

God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.

I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

From Pandora's Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.

To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.

The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.

There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.

The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

The world is unimportant and whoever recognizes this conquers his liberty.

To remain a man in today's world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.

Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.

You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us.

I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.

But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.

It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.

I knew a pure heart who refused tot be mistrustful.... He had written at his doorstep: From wherever you are, enter and be welcome. Who do you think responded to this lovely invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and gutted him.

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.

To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.

Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yeild nothing on the plane of freedom.

Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.

If the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round.
All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste
your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Betrayal answers betrayal, the mask of love is answered by the disappearance of love.

For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.

Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.

On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.

I didn't like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.

You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

All I know of morality I learned from football.

Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football.

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

One cannot be a part-time nihilist.

There is no shame in preferring happiness.

There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.

For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.