Albert Camus Quotes (281 Quotes)

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Big tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because of all the wrinkles, they weren't dripping off. They spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film over his ruined face.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

False judges are held up in the world's admiration and I alone know the true ones.

Am well. Thinking of you always. Love

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

She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

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 Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.

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

God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.

All that I know of Morality and obligations I owe to football

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

I love life thats my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

To give all, to sacrifice all without expecting to get anything inreturn--this is love.C'est cela l'amour, tout donner, tout sacrifier sans espoir de retour.

As usual I finish the day before the sea, sumptuous this evening beneath the moon, which writes Arab symbols with phosphorescent streaks on the slow swells. There is no end to the sky and the waters. How well they accompany sadness.

It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.

The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

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.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

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.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.

I don't want to be a genius I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

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

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

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

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.