Albert Camus Quotes

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

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

We are all special cases.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

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.

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.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

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.

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

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

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

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

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.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

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

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.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

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

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

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

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

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

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

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

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

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

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

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

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.

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.