Albert Camus Quotes

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

What's natural is the microbe. All the rest-heath, integrity, purity (if you like)-is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.

The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

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

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

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

The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.

[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.

Finally, and most of all, words failed him.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.

There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.

what doesn't kill you make you stronger and stronger

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.

As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.

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

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

Happiness is not everything and men have their duties. Mine is to find my mother, a homeland

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.

Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

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

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.

In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.