Albert Camus Quotes
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The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.
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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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Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.
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You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
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We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.
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I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey.
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Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
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If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
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A loveless world is a dead world.
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The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.
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An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
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Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.
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All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
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Un homme se définit aussi bien par ses comédies que par ses élans sincères.1
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Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.
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The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
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In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.
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Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
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What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
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All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
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Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.
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You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us.
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There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.