Albert Camus Quotes
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Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
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To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
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There is a metaphysical honour in ending the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.... War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. "Art and nothing but art", said Nietzsche, "we have art in order not to die of the truth."
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Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
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Yes, everything is simple. It's people who complicate things.
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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.
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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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The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
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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.
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Happiness is not everything and men have their duties. Mine is to find my mother, a homeland.
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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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Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.
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I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.
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Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.
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I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
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Liberty is a choreand a long-distance race, quite solitary, quite exhausting.
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Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.
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Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.
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I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
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To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
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A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
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Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
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Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.
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But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.