Albert Camus
Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.Collection: Life And Death
What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Play
I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.Collection: Christian
Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.Collection: Mean
I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Inspirational
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soulCollection: Art
I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.Collection: Selfishness
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.Collection: Lying
But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.Collection: Rivers
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.Collection: Life
Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.Collection: Greatness
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.Collection: Dream
But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.Collection: War
What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.Collection: Believe
The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.Collection: Giving
False judges are held up in the world's admiration and I alone know the true ones.Collection: Judging
There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.Collection: Hands
For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.Collection: Power
Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.Collection: Nature
Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.Collection: Simple
I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb's admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist's.Collection: Morning
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.Collection: Effort
One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.Collection: Thinking
A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Men
The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.Collection: Summer
Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.Collection: Earth
A loveless world is a dead world.Collection: World
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.Collection: Believe
Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.Collection: Imagination
One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.Collection: Ideas
When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.Collection: Secret
When the body is sad, the heart languishes.Collection: Heart
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.Collection: Art
Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.Collection: Doubt
When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.Collection: People
Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligé de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d'y croire.Collection: Atheist
Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.Collection: Waiting
All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Life
Liberty is the right not to lie.Collection: Lying
Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.Collection: Suicide
After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.Collection: Art
Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kissCollection: Kissing
It is easy to shield the outer body from poisoned arrows, but it is impossible to shield the mind from the poisoned darts that originate within itself. Greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism - these four poisoned darts originate within the mind and infect it with deadly poison.Collection: Fear
Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.Collection: Believe
For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.Collection: Taken