Albert Camus Quotes
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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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It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.
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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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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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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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Ah! my friend, for whomever is alone, without a god and without a master, the weight of time is terrible. One must then choose a master, God being out of style.
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Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences-all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.
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Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.
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The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.
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You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.
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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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No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.
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So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.
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Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.
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In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.
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...the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished andsquandered.
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Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
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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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To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.
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Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.
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One grows out of pity when it's useless.
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I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.
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One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
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This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.