Top 997 Quotes & Sayings by Albert Camus - Page 5

Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

In order to exist, man must rebel.

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.

If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.

I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey.

I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.

Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.

For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.

No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true.

Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

…there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.

Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.

What is human in me is not what is best in me. What is human in me is that I desire, and to obtain what I desire, I believe I would crush anything that stood in my way.

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.

People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

Ah cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They are They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!

Art does not tolerate reason.

And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.

Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.

You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.

When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.