Albert Camus's Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We are all special cases.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

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

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

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

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

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

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

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

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

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

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.