Albert Camus famous quotes

In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
-- Albert Camus

#Struggle #Reality #Years

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
-- Albert Camus

#Friendship #Kindness #Compassion

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

#Life #Art #Freedom

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
-- Albert Camus

#Truth #Essentials #Firsts

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
-- Albert Camus

#Order #Solitude #World

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.
-- Albert Camus

#Time #Long #Take Time

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

#Love #Principles #Impossible

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

#Life #Hope #Despair

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
-- Albert Camus

#Order #Atheism #World

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

#History #Encounters #Want

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

#War #Clouds #Storm

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

#Culture #World #Persuasion

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Bitterness #Bitter

There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
-- Albert Camus

#Gratitude #Night #Shadow

What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
-- Albert Camus

#Christian #World #Should

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

#Law #Intuition #Definitions

I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.
-- Albert Camus

#Heart #Imagination #Trying

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
-- Albert Camus

#Mediocrity #Mediocre #Idleness

Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
-- Albert Camus

#Heart #Faces #Wonder

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

#Believe #Cutting #Men

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
-- Albert Camus

#Artist #Judging #Community

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational #Order #Effort

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Conscious

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
-- Albert Camus

#Noble #Demand #Rebellion

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

#Meaning Of Life #Would Be #Stills

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
-- Albert Camus

#Philosophy #Men #Prey

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile 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's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
-- Albert Camus

#Struggle #Heart #Men

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
-- Albert Camus

#Army #Artist #Combat

I rebel; therefore I exist.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Rebel #Existentialism

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
-- Albert Camus

#Eye #Skills #People

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Passion #Logic

Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.
-- Albert Camus

#Said #No Hope #Remains

Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
-- Albert Camus

#Doubt #Doe #Needs

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

#Life #Success #Humor

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
-- Albert Camus

#Flower #Creating #Anxiety

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
-- Albert Camus

#Order #Dying #Killing

Life is the sum of your choices.
-- Albert Camus

#Opportunity #Choices #Life Is

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #No Hope

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
-- Albert Camus

#Truth #Firsts

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

#Music #Dream #Appreciation

The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
-- Albert Camus

#Hero #Passion #Live In The Present

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

#Feet #Mind #Suffering

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
-- Albert Camus

#Memories #Love You #Heart

There are more things to admire in men then to despise.
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Despise #Admire

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

#Future #Perfect #Culture

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
-- Albert Camus

#Bad Ass #Deeds #Ridiculous

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

#Essence #Innocence #Nostalgia

With rebellion, awareness is born
-- Albert Camus

#Awareness #Rebellion #Born

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
-- Albert Camus

#Freedom #4th Of July #Chance

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational #Life #Respect

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Lying #Heart

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

#4th Of July #Media #Be Good

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

#Peace #War #Wonder

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

#Life #Happiness #Summer

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

#Life #Arrogance #Mind

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
-- Albert Camus

#Wall #Writing #People

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

#Inspirational #Work #Passion

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.
-- Albert Camus

#Philosophy #Life Changing #Mean

I've seen of enough of people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.
-- Albert Camus

#Believe #Ideas #People

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

#Love #Life #People

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.
-- Albert Camus

#Passion #Heart #Law

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
-- Albert Camus

#Children #Numbers #World

You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
-- Albert Camus

#Mistake #Men #Waiting

To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
-- Albert Camus

#Ends #Feels

Murder is terribly exhausting.
-- Albert Camus

#Murder

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
-- Albert Camus

#Philosophical #Men #Obscurity

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Hair #Alive

Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.
-- Albert Camus

#Philosophy #Ironic #Passionate

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.
-- Albert Camus

#Art #Moving #Adventure

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.
-- Albert Camus

#Moments #Life Time

There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.
-- Albert Camus

#Heart #Stubborn #Human Heart

The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.
-- Albert Camus

#Pestilence #Duration #Truth Is

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Two #Four

Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth-with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its goodness.
-- Albert Camus

#Country #Men #Thinking

History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
-- Albert Camus

#History #Finals #Analysis

In that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.
-- Albert Camus

#Brother #Stars #Night

For years I've wanted to live according to everyone else's morals. I've forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth-after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational #Lying #Years

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
-- Albert Camus

#Divorce #Men #Feelings

It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.
-- Albert Camus

#Views #Ideas #Giving

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.
-- Albert Camus

#Art #Real #Criticism

The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
-- Albert Camus

#Absurd

Travel breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Stripped of our props, deprived of our masks, we are completely on the surface of ourselves.
-- Albert Camus

#Kind #Breaking Down #Mask

No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
-- Albert Camus

#Destiny #Emotion #Individual

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Years #Two

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
-- Albert Camus

#Passion #Forgiving #Age

Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.
-- Albert Camus

#Attitude #Fighting #Giving

Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.
-- Albert Camus

#Psychology #Ideology #Humans

Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.
-- Albert Camus

#Giving Up #Believe #Men

Find your happiness in yourself.
-- Albert Camus

#Happiness

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.
-- Albert Camus

#Christian #Heart #Men

It is not true that the heart wears out - but the body creates this illusion.
-- Albert Camus

#Heart #Body #Illusion

I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.
-- Albert Camus

#New York #Real #Blow

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
-- Albert Camus

#Fighting #History #Prestige

There is but one freedom, To put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved, and not the reverse.
-- Albert Camus

#Believe #Funeral #Problem

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.
-- Albert Camus

#Distance #Order #Cities

We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.
-- Albert Camus

#Thinking #Ends #Resolve

We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream , and we won't let this world die without a fight.
-- Albert Camus

#Dream #Fighting #Rebel

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.
-- Albert Camus

#Hands #Revolution #Found

In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.
-- Albert Camus

#Country

Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.
-- Albert Camus

#Solitude #Together #Crime