Albert Camus Quotes
-
Give up the tyranny of female charm.
-
... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.
-
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.
-
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
-
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
-
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
-
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
-
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
-
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.
-
He was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
-
I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
-
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
-
Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.
-
There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.
-
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.
-
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
-
On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.
-
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
-
Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
-
One cannot be a part-time nihilist.
-
In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.