Albert Camus Quotes

No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.

Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.

That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.

O light! This the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.

... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.

The Four Conditions of Happiness: Life in the open air, Love for another being,Freedom from ambition,Creation

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.

Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Suffering gives us no special rights.

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.

No ends, simply means.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

Art and revolt will die only with the last man.

...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.

A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.

He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.

In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.

Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.

What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

I have not stopped loving that which is sacred in this world.