Albert Camus Quotes
-
How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
-
Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.
-
Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.
-
In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.
-
Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.
-
Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.
-
Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
-
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.
-
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
-
The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.
-
Many artists, even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!
-
Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.
-
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
-
May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!
-
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.
-
What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.
-
Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.
-
What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
-
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.
-
Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.
-
...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
-
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've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.
-
On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.