Albert Camus Quotes
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I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.
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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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Happiness too is inevitable.
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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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Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.
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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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You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.
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What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
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The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.
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You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.
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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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Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
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By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
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... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.
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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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One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
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Yes, I'm happy, in human terms.
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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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Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.
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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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The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
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The sense of doing good , the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.
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The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.
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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.