Albert Camus Quotes
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In order to exist, man must rebel.
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But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.
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Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
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I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.
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I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.
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Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
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We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.
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Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
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In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
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Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. (This quotation is from Notebook IV in Notebooks: 1942-1951, not Myth of Sisyphus. The quotation appears in none of Camus books you find in bookstores).
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Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
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Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
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The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
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And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
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I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
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Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.
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Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
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What doesn't kill you make you stronger and stronger.
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That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.
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Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
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We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
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There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.
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No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
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It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.