Albert Camus Quotes

A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition, you cannot hear him but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show and you wonder why he is alive.

~ Albert Camus

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

~ Albert Camus

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.

~ Albert Camus

You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people - which means there is no way out. Happy and judged or absolved and miserable.

~ Albert Camus

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neithersterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain,in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man'sheart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy

~ Albert Camus

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.

~ Albert Camus

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. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

~ Albert Camus

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

~ Albert Camus

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

~ Albert Camus

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?

~ Albert Camus

Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.

~ Albert Camus

The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable

~ Albert Camus

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

~ Albert Camus

But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.

~ Albert Camus

. But itis obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is preciselylife that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis.To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.

~ Albert Camus

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

~ Albert Camus

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 they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.

~ Albert Camus

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

~ Albert Camus

...luck is not to be coerced.

~ Albert Camus

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

~ Albert Camus

There is something divine in mindless beauty.

~ Albert Camus

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

~ Albert Camus

You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.

~ Albert Camus

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

~ Albert Camus

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

~ Albert Camus

But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.

~ Albert Camus

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.

~ Albert Camus

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

~ Albert Camus

There is not love of life without despair about life.

~ Albert Camus

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

~ Albert Camus

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.

~ Albert Camus

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

~ Albert Camus

We are not certain we are never certain.

~ Albert Camus

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.

~ Albert Camus

Psychology is action not thinking about oneself.

~ Albert Camus

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

~ Albert Camus

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

~ Albert Camus

Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value and its face of eter1nal youth.

~ Albert Camus

In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

~ Albert Camus

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

~ Albert Camus