Albert Camus
No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.Collection: Sea
What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?Collection: Friends
Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.Collection: Honesty
When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.Collection: Sleep
To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.Collection: Peace
... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.Collection: Want
True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.Collection: Self Love
Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.Collection: Passion
The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.Collection: Heaven
Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.Collection: Greater
None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.Collection: Evil
The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.Collection: Nature
With rebellion, awareness is bornCollection: Awareness
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.Collection: Life
I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.Collection: Memories
...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves.Collection: Hands
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.Collection: Happiness
Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.Collection: Writing
Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.Collection: Work
... unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it.Collection: Marriage
In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.Collection: Believe
Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.Collection: Proof
In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.Collection: Time
In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.Collection: Men
The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.Collection: Truth
They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.Collection: Memories
At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.Collection: People
It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.Collection: Would Be
Don't let them tell us stories.Collection: Stories
In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.Collection: Country
Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.Collection: Thinking
I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.Collection: Saint
As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla. Actually his god was an argument at a political meeting and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of speeches.Collection: Political
Everybody knows life isn't worth living.Collection: Knows
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.Collection: Hands
For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.Collection: Stranger
Chacun exige d'e" tre innocent, a' tout prix, me" me si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel. Everyone insists on his or her innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven.Collection: Mean
We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.Collection: Lasts
But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.Collection: Age
The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.Collection: Children
There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.Collection: Guilt
I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.Collection: Giving Up
In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.Collection: Average
True artists scorn nothing.Collection: Artist
The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.Collection: Men
I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.Collection: Felt
A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.Collection: Men
Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.Collection: Believe
I was comfortable in all, I admit, but at the same time, nothing satisfied me. Each joy made me seek another.Collection: Joy