Albert Camus Quotes

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.

~ Albert Camus

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.

~ Albert Camus

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

~ Albert Camus

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

~ Albert Camus

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

~ Albert Camus

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

~ Albert Camus

Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.

~ Albert Camus

You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.

~ Albert Camus

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

~ Albert Camus

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

~ Albert Camus

Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched—just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance—so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Thosewho lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.

~ Albert Camus

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

~ Albert Camus

… 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.

~ Albert Camus

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

~ Albert Camus

At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

~ Albert Camus

And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.

~ Albert Camus

There is so much sttuborn hope in a human heart.

~ Albert Camus

There is do much sttuborn hope in a human heart.

~ Albert Camus

We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.

~ Albert Camus

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

~ Albert Camus

He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

~ Albert Camus

The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.

~ Albert Camus

Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.

~ Albert Camus

Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.

~ Albert Camus

And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!

~ Albert Camus

Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can an armistice for a mother bereaved of a son or for a man who buries his friend.

~ Albert Camus

It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: Close the window, it's too beautiful.

~ Albert Camus

որևէ քաղաք ճանաչելու ամենաճիշտ ձևերից մեկն էլ իմանալն է, թե ինչպե՞ս են այնտեղ աշխատում, ինչպե՞ս են սիրում, և ինչպե՞ս են մեռնում:

~ Albert Camus

As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.

~ Albert Camus

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

~ Albert Camus

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

~ Albert Camus

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

~ Albert Camus

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

~ Albert Camus

...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?

~ Albert Camus

That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning.

~ Albert Camus

Of whom and of what can I say: I know that! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.

~ Albert Camus

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

~ Albert Camus

Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.

~ Albert Camus

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

~ Albert Camus

She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

~ Albert Camus