Albert Camus Quotes

“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.”

“If one could only say just once: 'this is clear', all would be saved”

“There was the same dazzling red glare. The sea gasped for air with each shallow, stifled wave that broke on the sand. ...with every blade of light that flashed off the sand, from a bleached shell or a peice of broken glass, my jaws tightened. I walked for a long time.”

“The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.”

“I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.”

“The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.”

“La ve rite , comme la lumie' re, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau cre puscule qui met chaque objet en valeur. Truth, like light, blinds. A lie, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight which shows the value of each object.”

“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.”

“To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.”

“Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.”

“I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.”

“Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.”

“Am well. Thinking of you always. Love”

“Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.”

“I know of only one duty, and that is to love.”

“The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.”

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”

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

“Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.”

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

“The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.”

“In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time.”

“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”

“One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.”

“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.”

“There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.”

“I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?”

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

“So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.”

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

“Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.”

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”

“It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”

“Still, obviously, one can't be sensible all the time.”

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

“It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.”

“As for those whose role it is to love us - I mean, relatives and in-laws (what a word)- It's a different tune. They find the right word, but it's usually the one that wounds.”

“It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.”

“Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”

“After all, I do not have so many ways of proving that I am free. We is always free at the expense of someone else. It is a bother,but it is normal.”

“Mistakes are joyful, truth infernal.”

“Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.”

“I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”

“the one who doesnt play, doesnt win anything, but he actually looses somehting, {playing}”

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”

“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.”

“Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.”

“The only way out [of international dictatorship] is to place international law above governments, which means [...] that there must be a parliament for making it, and that parliament must be constituted by means of worldwide elections in which all nations will take part.”

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

“To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.”