Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

That's the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can't love without self-love.

Albert Camus
This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.

Albert Camus
Freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

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

Albert Camus
"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.

Albert Camus
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

Albert Camus
There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

Albert Camus
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.

Albert Camus
This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.

Albert Camus
For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.

Albert Camus
By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.

Albert Camus
Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

Albert Camus
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

Albert Camus
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Albert Camus
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Albert Camus
Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

Albert Camus
O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

Albert Camus
…there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.

Albert Camus
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Albert Camus
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.

Albert Camus
It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

Albert Camus
It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland when we are about to lose it.

Albert Camus
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

Albert Camus
But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

Albert Camus
Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

Albert Camus
Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to the present.

Albert Camus
If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda, that does not condemn their entire philosophy. But it does lead to the suspicion that one aspect of their thought, or of their logic, can lead to these appalling conclusions.

Albert Camus
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Albert Camus
Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.

Albert Camus
How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!

Albert Camus