Albert Camus Quotes
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Happiness too is inevitable.
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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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... 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.
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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.
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Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak.
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The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
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Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.
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Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
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This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
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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.
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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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Once in the midst of a seemingly endless winter, I discovered within myself an invincible spring.
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Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
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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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...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
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I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.
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I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
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Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
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God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.
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Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.
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A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.
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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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A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
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Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.