Albert Camus Quotes
God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.
A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
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.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.
They were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
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.
The realization that life is absurd and 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.
For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically gettin killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.
Who would dare speak the word "happiness" in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? And who could say that they are wrong? What would justice be without the chance for happiness? What purpose would freedom serve, if we had to live in misery?
