Albert Camus Quotes
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To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
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A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
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Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.
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After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.
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In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.
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The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.
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A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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But 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 seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death--these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.
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Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
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Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.
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The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.
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For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.
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When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
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Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
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Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
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No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
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A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
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Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
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A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
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There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
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If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.