Top 997 Quotes & Sayings by Albert Camus - Page 13

Have pity, Lord, on those who love and are separated.

What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.

Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

You know, [women] do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.

We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream , and we won't let this world die without a fight.

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.

The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab and they were all silent

I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

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.

But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.

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.

True artists scorn nothing.

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.

Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.

I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.

Liberty is dangerous.

Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.

There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.

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.

Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Ah! my friend, for whomever is alone, without a god and without a master, the weight of time is terrible. One must then choose a master, God being out of style.

Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.

There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.

Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.

I was comfortable in all, I admit, but at the same time, nothing satisfied me. Each joy made me seek another.

This is the century of fear.

To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless.

There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.

How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?

Life is the result of all your choices.

Mistakes are joyful, truth infernal.

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.” “On both, perhaps.”

But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.

The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.

the one who doesnt play, doesnt win anything, but he actually looses somehting, {playing}

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored

In that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.

We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.

That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.

Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.

... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.

I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.

There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Am well. Thinking of you always. Love

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.

You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth-with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its goodness.