Albert Camus Quotes
-
... 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.
-
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.
-
I was comfortable in all, I admit, but at the same time, nothing satisfied me. Each joy made me seek another.
-
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
-
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.
-
To remain a man in today's world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.
-
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
-
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.
-
When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
-
Ah! my friend, for whomever is alone, without a god and without a master, the weight of time is terrible. One must then choose a master, God being out of style.
-
We have art in order not to die of life.
-
The only way out of international dictatorship is to place international law above governments, which means that there must be a parliament for making it, and that parliament must be constituted by means of worldwide elections in which all nations will take part.
-
One cannot be a part-time nihilist.
-
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
-
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
-
...there was only one thing that interested her and that was getting into bed with men whenever she'd the chance. And I warned her straight. 'You'll be sorry one day, my girl, and wish you'd got me back'.
-
Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.
-
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.
-
But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.
-
“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.” “On both, perhaps.”
-
I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
-
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.
-
We don't have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.
-
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.