Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

Albert Camus
People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.

Albert Camus
"What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?"
"I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps."
"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?"
"Comprehension."

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
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Albert Camus
Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

Albert Camus
A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

Albert Camus
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Albert Camus
The mysterious universe is always calling, and, in some form or other, we are always answering.

Albert Camus
Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

Albert Camus
Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

Albert Camus
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.

Albert Camus
Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be met with another one and there would never be no end to it.

Albert Camus