Albert Camus Quotes
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The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
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How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!
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Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.
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What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?
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Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
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N'attendez pas le Jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours.
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The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.
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There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
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He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.
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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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No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait.
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The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.
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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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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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Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.
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To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.
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Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
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Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
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Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'
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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
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Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.
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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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At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she – or he – would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.