Albert Camus
History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.Collection: History
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.Collection: Impossible
You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.Collection: Art
There is no frontier between being and appearing.Collection: Frontiers
It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.Collection: Silence
I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.Collection: Lying
I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.Collection: Dream
My life was lucky so that I met, I loved (and disappointed) only outstanding people.Collection: People
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitfulCollection: Steps
Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.Collection: Happiness
After awhile you could get used to anything.Collection: Used
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.Collection: Retirement
Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.Collection: Wall
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.Collection: Heart
There is no shame in preferring happiness.Collection: Shame
Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.Collection: Memories
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.Collection: Punishment
We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.Collection: Evil
If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.Collection: Art
I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.Collection: Men
We all have a weakness for beauty.Collection: Weakness
Without freedom there is no art.Collection: Art
Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.Collection: Soul
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.Collection: Distance
No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.Collection: Gratitude
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.Collection: Life
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.Collection: Forever
And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.Collection: World
The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.Collection: Real
The absurd is sin without God.Collection: Sin
Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.Collection: Struggle
At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she--or he--would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.Collection: Mother
How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?Collection: Men
Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.Collection: Anger
Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.Collection: Life
This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.Collection: Character
Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty there is someone who quivers inside me.Collection: Honesty
My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.Collection: Giving
It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.Collection: Sunday
Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.Collection: Death
Without work all life goes rotten.Collection: Work
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.Collection: Dream
At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.Collection: Sky
The only way out [of international dictatorship] is to place international law above governments, which means [...] that there must be a parliament for making it, and that parliament must be constituted by means of worldwide elections in which all nations will take part.Collection: Mean
In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.Collection: Past
I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me.Collection: Names
I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself.Collection: Order
Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.Collection: Ideas
Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.Collection: Doe