Albert Camus Quotes

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

We are condemned to live together.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.

A fate is not a punishment.

In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.

Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star.... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.

In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.

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

Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?

To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.

Rule: Start by looking for what is valid in every man.

how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!

I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

What gives value to travel is fear. It is a fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. I look upon it more as an occasion for testing.

Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss

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.

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.

Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.

And I too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.

Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.

…there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.

We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

We have art in order not to die of life.

Everybody knows life isn't worth living.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

We're all special cases.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

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.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

Where there is no hope, we must invent it.

Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.

It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.