Albert Camus Quotes

No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.

The truth, as the light, makes blind.

An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.

Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.

Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.

Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.

But who would dare condemn me in this world with no judges, where no one is innocent!

Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

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

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.

But too many people now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance, even if they have to trample somewhat on the one who has been there so long.

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.

History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.

You know, [women] do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.

To understand one's world, one must sometimes turn away from it! To serve better, one must briefly hold it at a distance. Where can the necessary solitude be found, the long breathing space in which mind gathers its strength and takes stock of its courage.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one

Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.

Fate is not in man but around him

The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.

Life is the sum of your choices.

The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.

How hard it is, how bitter it is to become a man!

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.

It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.

Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.

I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

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.

Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?