Albert Camus Quotes

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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

Albert Camus
There is not love of life without despair about life.

Albert Camus
The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

Albert Camus
I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

Albert Camus
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Albert Camus
Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

Albert Camus
The act of love... is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.

Albert Camus
Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.

Albert Camus
The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.

Albert Camus
History shows that the less people read, the more books they buy.

Albert Camus
Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.

Albert Camus
To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.

Albert Camus
In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one's cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That's why life is difficult to live.

Albert Camus
For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering

Albert Camus
Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.

Albert Camus
The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.

Albert Camus
But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.

Albert Camus
They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.

Albert Camus
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Albert Camus
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

Albert Camus
There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

Albert Camus
It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness.
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

Albert Camus
I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.

Albert Camus
Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.
Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity! And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life.

Albert Camus
Let's not beat around the bush; I love life — that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

Albert Camus
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.

Albert Camus
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?

Albert Camus
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

Albert Camus
A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.

Albert Camus
Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood – never!

Albert Camus