Albert Camus Quotes
-
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.
-
There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.
-
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.
-
... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.
-
We writers must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.
-
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 Plague")
-
It is not true that the heart wears out - but the body creates this illusion.
-
No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.
-
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
-
In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.
-
Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.
-
There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.
-
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.
-
Absurd- that is the light mind that establishes its own borders.
-
For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
-
I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.
-
Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.
-
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.
-
There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
-
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
-
It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.
-
The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.
-
If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.
-
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.