Albert Camus Quotes
-
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
-
Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.
-
Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.
-
I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
-
Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
-
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?
-
A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.
-
It was in Spain that my generation learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
-
The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.
-
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
-
An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
-
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
-
There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
-
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.
-
They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.
-
The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.
-
I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored.
-
But too many people now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance, even if they have to trample somewhat on the one who has been there so long.
-
When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.
-
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
-
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.
-
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
-
Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
-
I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.