Albert Camus Quotes
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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.
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... 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.
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On certain mornings, as we turn a corner, an exquisite dew falls on our heart and then vanishes. But the freshness lingers, and this, always, is what the heart needs. The earth must have risen in just such a light the morning the world was born.
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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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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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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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Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
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Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.
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Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.
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Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
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Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.
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As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
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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.
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How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
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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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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.
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People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.
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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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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!
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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.