Albert Camus Quotes

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

“We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.”

“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”

“At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.”

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

“There are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

“The innocent is the person who explains nothing”

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

“Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.”

“At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.”

“But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.”

“Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.”

“We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.”

“For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.”

“Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.”

“Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.”

“But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.”

“But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.”

“There is no more futile punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

“Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.”

“It is easy to shield the outer body from poisoned arrows, but it is impossible to shield the mind from the poisoned darts that originate within itself. Greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism - these four poisoned darts originate within the mind and infect it with deadly poison.”

“Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.”

“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”

“The soul of a murderer is blind”

“We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'”