Albert Camus quotes

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

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• absurdity

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

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• idea

That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.

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• communication

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

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• human

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

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• continue

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

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• revolution

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

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• ask

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

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• getting

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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• truth

We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

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• perfection

Alas after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face.

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• age

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

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• life

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

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• city

Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence His Or Her heart first opened.

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• work

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

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• civilization

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

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• nation

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

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• aristocracy

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

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• judgement

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

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• art

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

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• life

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.

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• religion

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

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• murder

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

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• truth

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

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• culture

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.

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• tyranny

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

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• trouble

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

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• experience

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

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• virtue

We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.

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• certainty

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

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• death

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.

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• mankind

If there is sin against life, it consists in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

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• sin

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

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• inside

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

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• production

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

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• beginning

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

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• answer

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.

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• ideology

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

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• government

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

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• death

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

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• philosophy

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

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• sympathy

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

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• idealism

What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.

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• christianity

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

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• abandon

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

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• thought

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

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• beauty

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

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• obedience

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.

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• answer

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

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• life

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

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• fate

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.

• mind

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.

• art

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

• history

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.

• work

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

• freedom

Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.

• freedom

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.

• revolution

On certain mornings, as we turn a corner,an exquisite dew falls on our heartand then vanishes.But the freshness lingers, and this, always,is what the heart needs.The earth must have risen in just such a lightthe morning the world was born.

• creation

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

• becoming

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

• nature

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

• happiness

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

• love

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.

• despair

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.

• being

The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

• freedom

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

• time

These women behind the store windows? Dreams, sir, dreams at bargain prices, a trip to the Indies! These people perfume themselves with spices. You enter, they close the curtains, and the trip begins. The gods descend on the nude bodies and the islands drift, demented, with the tousled hair of palm trees in the breeze.

• women

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

• world

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

• prison

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.

• change

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

• god

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

• goals

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

• beautiful

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

• painting

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.

• reality

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

• judgment

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.

• trouble

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

• moving

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

• nature

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.

• work

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.

• optimism

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.

• suffering

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

• money

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

• money

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

• people

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

• life

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

• happiness

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

• art

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

• almost

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.

• happiness

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

• price

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.

• politics

My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: Let us rejoice. Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

• world

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

• beauty

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!

• oceans

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

• philosophical

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

• famous

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

• hope

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

• violence

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.

• sea

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

• love

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

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.

• capital

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

• alibi

Great ideas come into the world as quietly as doves. Perhaps then , if we listen attentively we shall hear, among the uproar of empires and nations, the faint fluttering of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. Some will say 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 deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. Each and every one, on the foundations of their own suffering and joy builds for all.

• ideas

We are all special cases.

• cases

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

• work

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

• art

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

• create

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.

• respect

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

• against

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

• life

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 afterward. These are games; one must first answer.

• suicide

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

• people

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.

• complete

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

• hard

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

• society

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

• children

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

• discovery