Albert Camus Quotes
-
Liberty is the right not to lie.
-
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.
-
If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.
-
Those who write clearly have readers.
-
Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.
-
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
-
This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.
-
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
-
I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.
-
...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'.
-
For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn't know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.
-
One cannot be a part-time nihilist.
-
Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.
-
As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla. Actually his god was an argument at a political meeting and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of speeches.
-
History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
-
To remain a man in today's world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.
-
In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.
-
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
-
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
-
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
-
You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
-
I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.
-
It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.
-
Happiness is generous. It does not subsist on destruction.