Albert Camus Quotes

I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.

What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?

If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.

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.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

To understand one's world, one must sometimes turn away from it! To serve better, one must briefly hold it at a distance. Where can the necessary solitude be found, the long breathing space in which mind gathers its strength and takes stock of its courage.

False judges are held up in the world's admiration and I alone know the true ones.

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.

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.

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

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.

There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb's admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist's.

Rule: Start by looking for what is valid in every man.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.

And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.

No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.

[Love] is the type of disease that spares neither the intelligent nor the idiotic.

There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.

For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

How hard it is, how bitter it is to become a man!

Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.

Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.

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.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.

Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois. (I know of morality, it is football that I owe.)

I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.

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.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

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.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.

Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty there is someone who quivers inside me.

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.