Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.

Albert Camus
Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth-with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its goodness.

Albert Camus
In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.

Albert Camus
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Albert Camus
To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.

Albert Camus
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

Albert Camus
I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

Albert Camus
If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.

Albert Camus
From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.

Albert Camus
What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

Albert Camus
If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

Albert Camus
Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.

Albert Camus
We're not sure, we can't be sure. Otherwise, there would be a solution; at least one could get oneself taken seriously.

Albert Camus
There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.

Albert Camus
The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.

Albert Camus
Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.

Albert Camus
Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.

Albert Camus
I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

Albert Camus
Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.

Albert Camus
I was tormented by my desire for a woman... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.

Albert Camus
Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Albert Camus
So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.

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
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
From Pandora's Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.

Albert Camus
The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.

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

Albert Camus
No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.

Albert Camus
Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.

Albert Camus
One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

Albert Camus