Albert Camus Quotes
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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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The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it.
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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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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 struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
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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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I don't want to represent man as he is, but only as he might be.
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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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Art does not tolerate reason.
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I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.
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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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It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
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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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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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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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To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
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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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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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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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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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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.