Top 997 Quotes & Sayings by Albert Camus - Page 16

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning

Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonabledesire and claims to give life a form it does not have.

God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.

The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.

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.

The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth , but it will be ruled over by men a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Cassars, because they were the first to understand and later, with time, by all 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.

... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.

I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.

His own faith, however, was not lacking in virtues since it consisted in acknowledging obscurely that he would be granted much without ever deserving anything.

Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty there is someone who quivers inside me.

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.

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.

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.

how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!

Some other memories of the funeral have stuck in my mind. The old boy’s face, for instance, when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. His eyes were streaming with tears, of exhaustion or distress, or both together. But because of the wrinkles they couldn’t flow down. They spread out, crisscrossed, and formed a smooth gloss on the old, worn face.

Marxism is not scientific: at the best, it has scientific prejudices.

What gives value to travel is fear. It is a fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. I look upon it more as an occasion for testing.

The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labor and culture.

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

It's not your pictures I like; it's your painting.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.

Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois. (I know of morality, it is football that I owe.)

What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?" "I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps." "Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?" "Comprehension.

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.

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.

For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.

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.

Suffering gives us no special rights.

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.

In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.

Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.

Without work all life goes rotten.

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?

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.

In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence.

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

life is a story and god is author.life is absurd.I think so.

The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.

There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.

Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

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.

In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.

My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.

People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.

Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.

In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.