Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla. Actually his god was an argument at a political meeting and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of speeches.

Albert Camus
No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

Albert Camus
Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

Albert Camus
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Albert Camus
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Albert Camus
What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport.

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

Albert Camus
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the State.

Albert Camus
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

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

Albert Camus
Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

Albert Camus
In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

Albert Camus
Poor people's memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time…Of course, there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labour, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue.

Albert Camus
Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.

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
If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.

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
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

Albert Camus
I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.

Albert Camus
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

Albert Camus
Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.

Albert Camus
The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth, but it will be ruled over by men a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Cassars, because they were the first to understand and later, with time, by all men.

Albert Camus
There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

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

Albert Camus