Albert Camus
Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.Collection: Virtue
Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening's slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.Collection: Girl
If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.Collection: Character
If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.Collection: Life
Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Passion
Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.Collection: Psychology
Mon cher ami, let's not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!!! Otherwise, we'll be left in shreds. We are forced to take the same precautions as the animal trainer. If, before going into the cage, he has the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild animals!!Collection: Cutting
...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.Collection: Art
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.Collection: Joy
To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fateCollection: Fate
There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.Collection: Men
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.Collection: Friday
All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.Collection: Happiness
We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.Collection: Thinking
If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.Collection: Men
Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences-all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.Collection: Freedom
Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.Collection: Existentialism
The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all.Collection: Loss
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.Collection: Death
I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.Collection: Mean
Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.Collection: Death
There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying.Collection: Pain
I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.Collection: Dog
If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.Collection: Happiness And Love
But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.Collection: Thinking
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.Collection: Ideas
Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.Collection: Eye
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")Collection: Men
Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.Collection: Mean
Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.Collection: Turning Your Back
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.Collection: Happiness And Love
Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.Collection: Wind
I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.Collection: Spring
This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.Collection: Heart
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.Collection: Men
A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.Collection: Jobs
Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.Collection: Eczema
It is better to burn than to disappear.Collection: Disappear
People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.Collection: Love
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.Collection: Thinking
The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.Collection: Art
The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of artCollection: Art
The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.Collection: Adventure
What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.Collection: Two
The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.Collection: Giving Up
Do you believe in God, doctor?" No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.Collection: Believe
We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.Collection: Meaningful
But - I cannot make a choice. I have my own sorrow, but I suffer with him, too; I share his pain. I understand all - that is my trouble.Collection: Pain