Albert Camus Quotes
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Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we'd never be done with it.
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In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
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The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.
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... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.
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There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
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And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.
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Morality, when formal, devours.
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The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art.
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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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Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
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Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
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Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.
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One cannot be a part-time nihilist.
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It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
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No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.
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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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The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
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There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.
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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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We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.
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...there was only one thing that interested her and that was getting into bed with men whenever she'd the chance. And I warned her straight. 'You'll be sorry one day, my girl, and wish you'd got me back'.
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They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.
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I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.
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We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.