Albert Camus Quotes
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The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
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There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
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Morality, when formal, devours.
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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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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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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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Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
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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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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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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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But who would dare condemn me in this world with no judges, where no one is innocent!
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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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The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
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The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art.
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.
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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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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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At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead.
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We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
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Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.
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A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
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Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
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Do you believe in God, doctor?" No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.
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On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.