Albert Camus Quotes

“A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.”

“Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.”

“Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.”

“These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.”

“In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.”

“In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.”

“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”

“Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.”

“In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.”

“Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.”

“Once in the midst of a seemingly endless winter, I discovered within myself an invincible spring.”

“I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.”

“Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.”

“The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab and they were all silent”

“In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.”

“It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.”

“Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?”

“I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.”

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

“We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.”

“Everything is true, and nothing is true!”

“Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.”

“For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.”

“I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.”

“It is easier to kill what we do not know.”