Albert Camus Quotes
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Art does not tolerate reason.
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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 normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
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It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
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I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.
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What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?
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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 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 struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
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When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.
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If one could only say just once: 'this is clear', all would be saved.
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From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
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The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it.
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The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
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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.
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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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A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
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To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
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I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
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Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.
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Liberty is a choreand a long-distance race, quite solitary, quite exhausting.
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I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.
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But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.
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Maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occured to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.