Albert Camus Quotes

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

Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.

The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

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

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.

I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.

Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.

The absurd is sin without God.

Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.

It's not your pictures I like; it's your painting.

I know [my label], in any case: a double face, a charming Janus, and underneath, the house motto: "Be wary". On my business cards:"Jean-Baptiste Clamence, actor".

Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.

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

We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.

The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.

Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

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.

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

There was the same dazzling red glare. The sea gasped for air with each shallow, stifled wave that broke on the sand. ...with every blade of light that flashed off the sand, from a bleached shell or a peice of broken glass, my jaws tightened. I walked for a long time.

There are more things to admire in men than to despise.

The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.

The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.

In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence.

Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

life is a story and god is author.life is absurd.I think so.

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.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.