Albert Camus Quotes

“I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.”

“The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.”

“Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.”

“Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

“To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.”

“I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.”

“I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”

“The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.”

“Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.”

“Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.”

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.”

“Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.”

“No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.”

“There is no love of life without despair of life.”

“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?”

“When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.”

“I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.”

“This is the century of fear.”

“After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.”

“The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.”

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”

“The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.”

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

“... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.”

“Life is the result of all your choices.”