Albert Camus Quotes
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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.
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Those who write clearly have readers.
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No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.
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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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Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.
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To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless.
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I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
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No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.
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One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.
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Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
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All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
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Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
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I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.
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One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
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The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.
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And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.
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We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.
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It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
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Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.
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Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.
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Morality, when formal, devours.
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At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.
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On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.
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To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.