Best Albert Camus Quotes

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

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

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

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 afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

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

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

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem...

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

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.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

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

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. But without freedom, no socialism either, except the socialism of the gallows.

Alas after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

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

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a person and life they lead.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.

There's no need to hang about waiting for the last judgment. It takes place every day.

The innocent is the person who explains nothing.