Albert Camus Quotes
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The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
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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.
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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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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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Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.
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I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
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Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.
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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.
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Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone ... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.
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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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Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
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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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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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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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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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...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
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The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.
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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.
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Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.
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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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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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There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.
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Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
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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.