Albert Camus Quotes

“But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.”

“That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3”

“Old women even forget how to love their sons. The heart gets worn out, Monsieur.”

“But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”

“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”

“By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.”

“Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.”

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”

“At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.”

“I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.”

“I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.”

“Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.”

“We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.”

“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”

“We don't have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.”

“The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.”

“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.”

“Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.”

“There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.”

“Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.”

“I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

“The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.”

“Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak.”

“What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

“maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occured to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. [...] Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.”