Albert Camus Quotes
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Absurd- that is the light mind that establishes its own borders.
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I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.
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What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?
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Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
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Men die and they are not happy.
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I was tormented by my desire for a woman ... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.
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Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
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We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream , and we won't let this world die without a fight.
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My great idea is that we must forgive the Pope. First of all, he needs it more than anyone else. Besides, it is the only way of placing oneself above him.
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You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
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The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
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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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And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
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Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.
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In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
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Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
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Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
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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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...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.
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... it is true that I do not respect human life more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.
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He's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.
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To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
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I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.