Albert Camus
There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.Collection: Life
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.Collection: Realization
I rebel; therefore I exist.Collection: Life
Yes, everything is simple. It's people who complicate things.Collection: Simple
Integrity needs no rules.Collection: Integrity
Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.Collection: Cells
Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star.... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.Collection: Faith
La ve rite , comme la lumie' re, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau cre puscule qui met chaque objet en valeur. Truth, like light, blinds. A lie, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight which shows the value of each object.Collection: Beautiful
Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidenceCollection: Independence
The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.Collection: Life
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?Collection: Wall
For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.Collection: Joy
Everything is true, and nothing is true!Collection: Existentialism
The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.Collection: Sea
The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.Collection: Gratitude
... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.Collection: Family
Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.Collection: Progress
The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.Collection: Eulogy
Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.Collection: Religious
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.Collection: Secret
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.Collection: Believe
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?Collection: Succeed
The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.Collection: Passion
Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.Collection: Desert
A régime [Nazism] which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests. But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.Collection: Acting
In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.Collection: Destiny
His own faith, however, was not lacking in virtues since it consisted in acknowledging obscurely that he would be granted much without ever deserving anything.Collection: Would Be
May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!Collection: Friendship
Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.Collection: Passion
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.Collection: Happiness
There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.Collection: Melancholy
I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.Collection: Sky
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.Collection: Struggle
Life should be lived to the point of tearsCollection: Tears
It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'Collection: Unity
Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.Collection: Art
We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.Collection: Tasks
...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.Collection: Life
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.Collection: Writing
If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.Collection: Inspirational
I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.Collection: Time
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.Collection: Mean
It's better to bet on this life than on the next.Collection: Next
Having money is a way of being free of money.Collection: Money
We have art in order not to die of life.Collection: Art
My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.Collection: Love
You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.Collection: Notion
What is human in me is not what is best in me. What is human in me is that I desire, and to obtain what I desire, I believe I would crush anything that stood in my way.Collection: Crush