Albert Camus Quotes
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After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
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No ends, simply means.
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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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We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
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There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
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Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
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I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
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Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.
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Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
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Having money is a way of being free of money.
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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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Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.
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Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
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I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.
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The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
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The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
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What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
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It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
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Art does not tolerate reason.
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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
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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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I had been right I was still right I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing and I had done another. And so?
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Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.