Albert Camus Quotes

499 Sourced Quotes

I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.

Albert Camus
"This is the truth," we say. "You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right."

Albert Camus
A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

Albert Camus
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Albert Camus
Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.

Albert Camus
In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.

Albert Camus
"I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

Albert Camus
We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

Albert Camus
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.

Albert Camus
I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

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

Albert Camus