Albert Camus Quotes

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As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.

Albert Camus
He was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...

Albert Camus
The real saint, Baudelaire pretends to think, is he who flogs and kills people for their own good. His argument will be heard. A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.

Albert Camus
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Albert Camus
Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

Albert Camus
My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.

Albert Camus
To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.

Albert Camus
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

Albert Camus
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

Albert Camus
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

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

Albert Camus
I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one

Albert Camus
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

Albert Camus
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.

Albert Camus
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.

Albert Camus
A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.

Albert Camus
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Albert Camus
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.

Albert Camus
The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

Albert Camus
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

Albert Camus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

Albert Camus
There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.

Albert Camus
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

Albert Camus
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

Albert Camus
Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

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

Albert Camus
"This is the truth," we say. "You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right."

Albert Camus
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.

Albert Camus
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Albert Camus
Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.

Albert Camus