Albert Camus Quotes

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The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

Albert Camus
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Albert Camus
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Albert Camus
Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.

Albert Camus
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Albert Camus
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

Albert Camus
Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.

Albert Camus
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.

Albert Camus
Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

Albert Camus
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Albert Camus
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

Albert Camus
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

Albert Camus
There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

Albert Camus
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Albert Camus
More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Albert Camus
You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.

Albert Camus
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.

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

Albert Camus
And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.

Albert Camus
In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.

Albert Camus
Martha: 'What is autumn?'
Jan: 'A second spring, where every leaf is a flower.'

Albert Camus
Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.

Albert Camus
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

Albert Camus
We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.

Albert Camus
The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.

Albert Camus
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

Albert Camus
What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

Albert Camus
When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.

Albert Camus
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.

Albert Camus