Albert Camus Quotes
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He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
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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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At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
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We're going forward, but nothing changes.
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You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.
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The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.
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I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.
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It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
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What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?
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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.
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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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That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.
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... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonabledesire and claims to give life a form it does not have.
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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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The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.
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To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
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Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.
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Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
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The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
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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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What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.
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Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
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Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
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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.