Albert Camus Quotes
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Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.
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To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
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Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.
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Having money is a way of being free of money.
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
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...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves.
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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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Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
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Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
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Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.
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But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.
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All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
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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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The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
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I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.
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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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Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
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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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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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I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
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Those who write clearly have readers.
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In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.
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Yes, everything is simple. It's people who complicate things.
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We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'