Albert Camus – 70 Quotes

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70 Quotes by Albert Camus

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

– Albert Camus

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

– Albert Camus

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

– Albert Camus

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

– Albert Camus

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

– Albert Camus

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

– Albert Camus

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

– Albert Camus

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.

– Albert Camus

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

– Albert Camus

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

Blessed are the hearts that can bend they shall never be broken.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

– Albert Camus

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

– Albert Camus

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

– Albert Camus

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

– Albert Camus

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

– Albert Camus

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

– Albert Camus

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

– Albert Camus

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

– Albert Camus

Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

– Albert Camus

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

– Albert Camus

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

– Albert Camus

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

– Albert Camus

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

– Albert Camus

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

– Albert Camus

Don’t walk behind me I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

– Albert Camus

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

– Albert Camus

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

– Albert Camus

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

– Albert Camus

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… inside ourselves.

– Albert Camus

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

– 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

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

– Albert Camus

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.

– Albert Camus

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

– Albert Camus

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

– Albert Camus

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus

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.

– Albert Camus