Albert Camus Quotes
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You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.
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Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.
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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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What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
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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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When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.
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It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.
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Let’s not beat around the bush; I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
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A régime Nazism which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests. But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.
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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.
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... unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it.
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To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
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A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.
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Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.
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... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.
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To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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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.
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We are condemned to live together.
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Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
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And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
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The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.
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Beware of those who say: "I know this too well to be able to express it." For if they cannot do so, this is because they don't know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.
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Still, obviously, one can't be sensible all the time.