Top 997 Quotes & Sayings by Albert Camus
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French philosopher Albert Camus.
Last updated on September 8, 2024.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
Integrity has no need of rules.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
Related Authors
Alan Watts Quotes
English
Philosopher
Aristotle Quotes
Greek
Philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
German
Philosopher
Blaise Pascal Quotes
French
Philosopher
Confucius Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Francis Bacon Quotes
English
Philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
German
Philosopher
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes
Indian
Philosopher
Laozi Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Michel de Montaigne Quotes
French
Philosopher
Plato Quotes
Greek
Philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
American
Philosopher
Seneca the Younger Quotes
Roman
Philosopher
Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
Danish
Philosopher
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Scottish
Philosopher
William James Quotes
American
Philosopher