Albert Camus Quotes
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We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
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To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
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Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
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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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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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We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'
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Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.
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I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
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What is human in me is not what is best in me. What is human in me is that I desire, and to obtain what I desire, I believe I would crush anything that stood in my way.
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I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
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Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.
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There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.
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Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.
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Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
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Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
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Marxism is not scientific: at the best, it has scientific prejudices.
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If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.
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To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
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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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Without freedom there is no art.
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Morality, when formal, devours.
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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 struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.