Albert Camus Quotes

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.

~ Albert Camus

... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

~ Albert Camus

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

~ Albert Camus

Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it.

~ Albert Camus

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

~ Albert Camus

Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!

~ Albert Camus

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

~ Albert Camus

If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong t

~ Albert Camus

Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.

~ Albert Camus

Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.

~ Albert Camus

February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.

~ Albert Camus

So it came to this, that— against the grain, no doubt—the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order! This, I thought, was a flaw in the system; and, on the face of it, my view was sound enough. On the other hand, I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system. It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch.

~ Albert Camus

But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

~ Albert Camus

Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder.

~ Albert Camus

In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.

~ Albert Camus

On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

~ Albert Camus

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. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

~ Albert Camus

So we are steaming along without any landmark, we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming.

~ Albert Camus

On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.

~ Albert Camus

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

~ Albert Camus

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

~ Albert Camus

It is better to burn than to disappear.

~ Albert Camus

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it

~ Albert Camus

As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.

~ Albert Camus

When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.

~ Albert Camus

...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.

~ Albert Camus

When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

~ Albert Camus

O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us! A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!

~ Albert Camus

There is only one class of men, the privileged class

~ Albert Camus

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

~ Albert Camus

In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions

~ Albert Camus

We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.

~ Albert Camus

I rebel, therefore I exist.

~ Albert Camus

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

~ Albert Camus

After awhile you could get used to anything.

~ Albert Camus

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

~ Albert Camus

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

~ Albert Camus

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.

~ Albert Camus

For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

~ 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