Albert Camus Quotes
-
God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.
-
In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.
-
Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.
-
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
-
And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.
-
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
-
To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.
-
Once in the midst of a seemingly endless winter, I discovered within myself an invincible spring.
-
There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
-
I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.
-
A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
-
Yes, I'm happy, in human terms.
-
How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
-
It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
-
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
-
I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
-
... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.
-
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
-
Without freedom there is no art.
-
Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.
-
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.
-
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
-
Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
-
Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.