Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

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

Albert Camus
For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

Albert Camus
Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.

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

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

Albert Camus
Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.

Albert Camus
I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself.

Albert Camus
With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be history of its successive regrets and impotences.

Albert Camus
Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.

Albert Camus
All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.

Albert Camus
On certain mornings, as we turn a corner,
an exquisite dew falls on our heart
and then vanishes.
But the freshness lingers, and this, always,
is what the heart needs.
The earth must have risen in just such a light
the morning the world was born.

Albert Camus
The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.

Albert Camus
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.

Albert Camus
"I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

Albert Camus
I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

Albert Camus
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their scepticism.

Albert Camus
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Albert Camus
If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

Albert Camus
A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.

Albert Camus
For there to be equivalence [between a premeditated crime and a crime of "pure violence"], the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

Albert Camus
I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.

Albert Camus
People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.

Albert Camus
It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

Albert Camus
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.

Albert Camus
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

Albert Camus