Albert Camus Quotes

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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.

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.

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

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

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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

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

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.

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

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

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

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

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

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

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.

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

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

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

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.

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.

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.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

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.

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

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

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

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

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

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

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.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

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.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

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.

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

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

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.

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

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

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

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

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

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.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

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.

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

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

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

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

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

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.

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

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.

Integrity has no need of rules.

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

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

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

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