Albert Camus Quotes
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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.
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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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... 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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Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
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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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We are all special cases.
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Big tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because of all the wrinkles, they weren't dripping off. They spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film over his ruined face.
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No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.
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Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
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I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.
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The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
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In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.
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If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.
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If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.
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There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.
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In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.
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I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.
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Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.
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Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.
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I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.
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Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak.
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In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.
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Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.
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Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.