Top 997 Quotes & Sayings by Albert Camus - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French philosopher Albert Camus.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
We are all special cases.
Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.
The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
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