Albert Camus Quotes
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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.
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I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.
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Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
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Happiness too is inevitable.
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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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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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In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.
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When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
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Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening's slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.
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It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.
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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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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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Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
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Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
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If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.
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The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.
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The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
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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.
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.
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Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
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By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
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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.
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Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.
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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.