Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.

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
We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

Albert Camus
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.

Albert Camus
I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Albert Camus
Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

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
"What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?"
"I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps."
"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?"
"Comprehension."

Albert Camus
To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Albert Camus
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

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

Albert Camus
A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

Albert Camus
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Albert Camus
The mysterious universe is always calling, and, in some form or other, we are always answering.

Albert Camus
Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

Albert Camus
Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.

Albert Camus
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

Albert Camus
I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that i finally obey.

Albert Camus
For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.

Albert Camus
No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.

Albert Camus
Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be met with another one and there would never be no end to it.

Albert Camus
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.

Albert Camus
These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

Albert Camus
What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.

Albert Camus
Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

Albert Camus
A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.

Albert Camus
The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labor and culture.

Albert Camus
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

Albert Camus
Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

Albert Camus
Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.

Albert Camus