Albert Camus Quotes

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

That's the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can't love without self-love.

I have not stopped loving that which is sacred in this world.

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.

A régime [Nazism] which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests. But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.

You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.

This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.

The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.

His own faith, however, was not lacking in virtues since it consisted in acknowledging obscurely that he would be granted much without ever deserving anything.

Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labor and culture.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.

Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.

May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!

The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.

Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.

Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'

Marxism is not scientific: at the best, it has scientific prejudices.

Suffering gives us no special rights.

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.

For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.

life is a story and god is author.life is absurd.I think so.

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.

The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.

It's not your pictures I like; it's your painting.

Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty there is someone who quivers inside me.

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.

... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.

I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.

There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.

how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!

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

In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.

In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.

Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois. (I know of morality, it is football that I owe.)

Finally, and most of all, words failed him.

... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.

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

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself.

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

he's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible.

History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.

The world is unimportant and whoever recognizes this conquers his liberty.