Albert Camus Quotes

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The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

Albert Camus
I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.

Albert Camus
Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.

Albert Camus
The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.

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
I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

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
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 truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.

Albert Camus
There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.

Albert Camus
It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.

Albert Camus
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

Albert Camus
Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.

Albert Camus
Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.

Albert Camus
Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

Albert Camus
Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.

Albert Camus
I conceived at least one great love in my life, of which I was always the object.

Albert Camus
It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.

Albert Camus
Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.

Albert Camus
On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

Albert Camus
The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.

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
People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.

Albert Camus
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

Albert Camus
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Albert Camus
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.

Albert Camus
The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.

Albert Camus
To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.

Albert Camus
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

Albert Camus
There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.

Albert Camus