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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For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.
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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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As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
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There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
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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 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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But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.
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If the world were clear, art would not exist.
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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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Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
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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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In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
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The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
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There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
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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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I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.
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The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.
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They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.
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To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
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So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.
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Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
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The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.
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It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.