Albert Camus Quotes

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

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

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

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.

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.

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.

The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.

Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.

But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation.

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

With rebellion, awareness is born

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.

In order to exist, man must rebel.

And then came human beings; humans wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.

Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois. (I know of morality, it is football that I owe.)

I want to know if I can live with what I know, and only than.

Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.

The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

When there is no hope, one must invent hope.

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

We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream , and we won't let this world die without a fight.

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.

All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.

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.

The act of love is a confession.

The sense of doing good , the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

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.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Beware of those who say: "I know this too well to be able to express it." For if they cannot do so, this is because they don't know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.

There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.