Albert Camus Quotes
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If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
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To think is first of all to create a world or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing.
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But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
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…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
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Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
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You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.
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As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
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At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.
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Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.
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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
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The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.
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Ce que, finalement, je sais de plus sûr sur la morale et les obligations des hommes, c'est au football que je le dois.
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The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
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The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.
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What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?
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The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.
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Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
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This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.
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To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.
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Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.
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The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.
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The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.