Albert Camus Quotes

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

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.

And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Where there is no hope, we must invent it.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

Yes, everything is simple. It's people who complicate things.

True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

There is no shame in preferring happiness.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.

Life should be lived to the point of tears

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.

The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.

That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3

Life is the sum of your choices.

A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.

Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.

The innocent is the person who explains nothing

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.

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.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.

Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.