Albert Camus Quotes
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When the body is sad, the heart languishes.
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“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.”
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Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.
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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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Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.
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The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
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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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There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.
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The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
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For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.
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You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
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Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?
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Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
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We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
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Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.
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I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
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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.
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I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.
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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.
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We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.
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In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
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Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.
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One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
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The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.