Albert Camus Quotes

“Yes, everything is simple. It's people who complicate things.”

“Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”

“People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.”

“Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.”

“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.”

“You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.”

“Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.”

“If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.”

“There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.”

“For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.”

“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.”

“The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.”

“She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.”

“What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.”

“I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.”

“The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.”

“[Liberty] is a choreand a long-distance race, quite solitary, quite exhausting.”

“You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.”

“No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”

“The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.”

“Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.”

“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.”

“Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.”

“For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.”

“Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”