Albert Camus Quotes

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

~ Albert Camus

It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.

~ Albert Camus

But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves

~ Albert Camus

Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

~ Albert Camus

He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs for one another.

~ Albert Camus

I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.

~ Albert Camus

But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.

~ Albert Camus

I never truly believed that human business was some serious thing.

~ Albert Camus

How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.

~ Albert Camus

Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.

~ Albert Camus

But memory is less disposed to compromise

~ Albert Camus

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

~ Albert Camus

Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.

~ Albert Camus

What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

~ Albert Camus

Every time a man (myself) gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. Every time, it has always been the great misfortune of wanting to show off which has lessened me in the presence of the truth. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary. I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one’s secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown.

~ Albert Camus

I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.

~ Albert Camus

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

~ Albert Camus

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

~ Albert Camus

Who taught you all this, doctor?The reply came promptly:Suffering.

~ Albert Camus

The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.'This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire—and it belonged to Marie.

~ Albert Camus

I know positively… that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes… it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death.

~ Albert Camus

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

~ Albert Camus

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

~ Albert Camus

The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.

~ Albert Camus

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are myrevolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity ofconsciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitationto death—and I refuse suicide.

~ Albert Camus

The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand.

~ Albert Camus

Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?

~ Albert Camus

...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...

~ Albert Camus

Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.

~ Albert Camus

I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it is a fact one doesn't come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That's why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim's side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how on attains to the third category; in other words, to peace.

~ Albert Camus

We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

~ Albert Camus

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to 'LIllustration. Something desperate, you know.Zagreus smiled. You're a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.

~ Albert Camus

People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.

~ Albert Camus

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

~ Albert Camus

Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness.

~ Albert Camus

We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill.

~ Albert Camus

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

~ Albert Camus

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

~ Albert Camus

I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.

~ Albert Camus

But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.

~ Albert Camus