Albert Camus Quotes
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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
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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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Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.
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To understand one's world, one must sometimes turn away from it! To serve better, one must briefly hold it at a distance. Where can the necessary solitude be found, the long breathing space in which mind gathers its strength and takes stock of its courage.
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I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
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When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
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When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.
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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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There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.
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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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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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In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
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The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
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If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.
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Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
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Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
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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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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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I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.
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The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.
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Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
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Powerful, yes, that is the word that I constantly rolled on my tongue, I dreamed of absolute power, the kind that forces others tokneel, that forces the enemy to capitulate, finally converting him, and the more the enemy is blind, cruel, sure of himself, buried in his conviction, the more his admission proclaims the royalty of he who has brought on his defeat.
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I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
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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.