Best quotes by the French Philosopher Albert Camus
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.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
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.
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
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.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Do not wait for the last judgement. It takes place every day.
Live to the point of tears.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
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.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
You can't create experience. You must undergo it.
We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.
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Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Live to the point of tears.
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.
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Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
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.
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.
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Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all -- he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
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.
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Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. Can they be brought together? This is a practical question. We must get down to it. I despise intelligence really means: I cannot bear my doubts.
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
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To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a person and life they lead.
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.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
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Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
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.
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
Alas after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.
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.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
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.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
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.
It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland when we are about to lose it.
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.
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.
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.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
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.
If there is sin against life, it consists in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
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.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
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.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
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.
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
Every revolutionary ends up 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.
A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
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.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
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.
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you dont help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
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.
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
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.
Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
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.
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.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Walk beside me, and just be my friend.
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.
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.
To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?
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.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.
Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.
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.
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.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
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.
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.
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
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.
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.
Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
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!
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.
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, that it is inside ourselves.
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 Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die -- and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
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.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
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.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all -- he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
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.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
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.
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.
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
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