Albert Camus
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.Collection: Forgiveness
The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.Collection: Artist
The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.Collection: Reality
Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.Collection: Inspirational
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.Collection: Flower
We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.Collection: Blood
We can't do without dominating others or being served.... The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.Collection: Power
The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.Collection: Teacher
To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.Collection: Passion
They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.Collection: Hurt
She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.Collection: Mean
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics-\-\-in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.Collection: Drama
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.Collection: Men
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.Collection: Doe
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.Collection: Believe
... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.Collection: Life
A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.Collection: Profound
A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.Collection: Men
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.Collection: Life
Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.Collection: Men
Morality, when formal, devours.Collection: Perseverance
I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.Collection: Stars
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.Collection: Children
How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?Collection: Dry
That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.Collection: Sacrifice
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.Collection: Life
The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.Collection: Thinking
Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.Collection: Doctors
I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.Collection: Heart
I was tormented by my desire for a woman ... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.Collection: Cells
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.Collection: Friendship
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.Collection: Men
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.Collection: Life
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.Collection: Thinking
There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.Collection: Solitude
The look of success, when it is worn a certain way, would infuriate a jackass.Collection: Success
There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.Collection: Helping Others
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.Collection: Men
The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.Collection: Life
Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.Collection: Life
Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Stranger
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.Collection: Suicide
But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.Collection: Men
A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.Collection: Men
All healthy men have thought of their own suicideCollection: Suicide
Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.Collection: Money
Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.Collection: Memories
The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.Collection: Art