Albert Camus Quotes
-
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.
-
“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.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
-
Indeed, men never know how to love. nothing satisfies them. All they know is to dream, to imagine new duties, to look for new countries and new homes. While we women, we know that we must hasten to love, to share the same bed, hold hands, and fear absence. When we women love, we dream of nothing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
You know, women do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.
-
Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.
-
May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!
-
... 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.
-
I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.
-
To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation.
-
Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.
-
Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.
-
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 did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
-
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.
-
My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.
-
We don't have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.
-
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.
-
The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.