Albert Camus Quotes
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I don't want to represent man as he is, but only as he might be.
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I knew a pure heart who refused tot be mistrustful.... He had written at his doorstep: "From wherever you are, enter and be welcome". Who do you think responded to this lovely invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and gutted him.
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In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence.
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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
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Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses.
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And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
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If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.
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The world is unimportant and whoever recognizes this conquers his liberty.
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There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.
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The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.
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In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.
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It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
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But - I cannot make a choice. I have my own sorrow, but I suffer with him, too; I share his pain. I understand all - that is my trouble.
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Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
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The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
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There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.
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To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
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As for those whose role it is to love us – I mean, relatives and in-laws – It's a different tune. They find the right word, but it's usually the one that wounds.
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There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
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Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.
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I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.
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It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
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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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No ends, simply means.