Albert Camus quotes
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Albert Camus is famous French philosopher with many wise quotes. Share the best Albert Camus quotations of all times with your friends and family.
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
Integrity has no need of rules.
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.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a person and life they lead.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Live to the point of tears.
Do not wait for the last judgement. It takes place every day.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offers us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
You can't create experience. You must undergo it.
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
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Nobody raises his reputation by lowering others.
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
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Go to table of contentsAbout Albert Camus
Where is Albert Camus from? Albert Camus is French who said awesome wise words. A influential and well recognized philosopher all over the world. The following quotations and images represent the French nature embed in Albert Camus's character.
What Albert Camus was famous for? Albert Camus is famous philosopher with many good quotes. Well-known and respected in French society for wise sayings. Browse a lot of Albert Camus books and reference books with quotes from Albert Camus on Amazon.
Top Albert Camus quotes about life
What are the best life quotes by Albert Camus? List with Top 10 Albert Camus sayings and quotes about life.
Live to the point of tears.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
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.
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
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.
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.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
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.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
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Top Albert Camus quotes about love
What are the best love quotes by Albert Camus? List with Top 10 Albert Camus sayings and quotes about love.
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
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.
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
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Top Albert Camus quotes about work
What are the best work quotes by Albert Camus? List with Top 10 Albert Camus sayings and quotes about work.
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.
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.
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.
Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
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.
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Top Albert Camus quotes about world
What are the best world quotes by Albert Camus? List with Top 10 Albert Camus sayings and quotes about world.
The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
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.
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.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
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.
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Top Albert Camus quotes about truth
What are the best truth quotes by Albert Camus? List with Top 10 Albert Camus sayings and quotes about truth.
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
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.
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More quotes by Albert Camus
Want some more good quotations by Albert Camus? Explore the rest of 213 sayings by Albert Camus.
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
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.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
Alas after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face.
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.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
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.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland when we are about to lose it.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
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.
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
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.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
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.
If there is sin against life, it consists in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
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.
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
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.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
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.
What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
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.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
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.
A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
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.
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.
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.
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
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.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
I know of only one duty, and that is to 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.
Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.
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.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
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.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your 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.
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
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.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
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.
No cause justifies the deaths of innocent 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.
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
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.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
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.
Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
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.
We are all special cases.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
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.
How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
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?
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When was Albert Camus birthday? Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913.
Who is Albert Camus? Some facts about Albert Camus from biography. Albert Camus was an Algerian-born French author, philosopher, and journalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He is often cited as a proponent of existentialism (the philosophy that he was associated with during his own lifetime), but Camus himself rejected this particular lab... Read more about Albert Camus on Wikipedia or watch videos with quotes from Albert Camus on YouTube.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1
Introduction
Part 2
Best Albert Camus quotes
Top 10 quotes by Albert Camus
Top 10 Albert Camus quotes about life
Top 10 Albert Camus quotes about love
Part 3
Albert Camus quotes images
Part 4
Life
Love
Work
World
Truth
All quotes
Part 5
Similar Philosophers
Part 6
Favorite topics
Part 7
Conclusion