Albert Camus Quotes
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When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
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I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.
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By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
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I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.
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It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
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You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
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I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
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How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
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We have art in order not to die of life.
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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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My great idea is that we must forgive the Pope. First of all, he needs it more than anyone else. Besides, it is the only way of placing oneself above him.
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It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
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Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.
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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.
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There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.
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Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
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Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.
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There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
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I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
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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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All I know of morality I learned from football.
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The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
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We writers must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.
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Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.