Albert Camus Quotes
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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.
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An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
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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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To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
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Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
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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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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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I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
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All I know of morality I learned from football.
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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.
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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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The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
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I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.
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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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In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.
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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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Some other memories of the funeral have stuck in my mind. The old boy’s face, for instance, when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. His eyes were streaming with tears, of exhaustion or distress, or both together. But because of the wrinkles they couldn’t flow down. They spread out, crisscrossed, and formed a smooth gloss on the old, worn face.
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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 know of only one duty, and that is to love.
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The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth , but it will be ruled over by men a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Cassars, because they were the first to understand and later, with time, by all men.
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Integrity has no need of rules.
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I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.
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Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.
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Knowing what Christ knew , knowing all about mankind--ah! who would have thought that the crime is not so much to make others die, but to die oneself--confronted day and night with his innocent crime, it became too difficult to go on. It was better to get it over with, to not defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to have survived, and to go elsewhere, where, perhaps, he would be supported.