Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

Albert Camus
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

Albert Camus
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Albert Camus
Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

Albert Camus
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.

Albert Camus
As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.

Albert Camus
As for those whose role it is to love us - I mean, relatives and in-laws (what a word)- It's a different tune. They find the right word, but it's usually the one that wounds.

Albert Camus
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.

Albert Camus
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

Albert Camus
I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one

Albert Camus
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

Albert Camus
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

Albert Camus
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

Albert Camus
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

Albert Camus
To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.

Albert Camus
My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.

Albert Camus
Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

Albert Camus
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Albert Camus
The real saint, Baudelaire pretends to think, is he who flogs and kills people for their own good. His argument will be heard. A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.

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

Albert Camus
There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.

Albert Camus
Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.

Albert Camus
He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Albert Camus
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.

Albert Camus
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.

Albert Camus
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

Albert Camus
Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

Albert Camus
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.

Albert Camus
And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.

Albert Camus
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

Albert Camus