Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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
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
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
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