Albert Camus Quotes

I was wrong, after all, to tell you that the essential was to avoid judgement. The essential is being able to permit oneself everything, even if, from time to time, one has to profess vociferously one's own infamy.

There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.

The American novel
claims to find its unity in reducing man either to elementals or to his external reactions and to
his behavior. It does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic
French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and
recapitulate the behavior of a character. This is why the unity of this novel form is only the unity of the flash of
recognition. Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of
reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions,
and finally by acting as if men were
entirely defined by their daily automatisms. On this mechanical level men, in fact, seem exactly alike, which
explains this peculiar universe in which all the characters appear interchangeable, even down to their physical
peculiarities. This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension. In addition to the fact that realism
in art is, as we shall see, an incomprehensible idea, it is perfectly obvious that this fictitious world is not attempting
a reproduction, pure and simple, of reality, but the most arbitrary form of stylization. It is born of a mutilation, and
of a voluntary mutilation, performed on reality. The unity thus obtained is a degraded unity, a leveling off of human
beings and of the world. It would

Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.

What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

Who, despite the pretensions of this society,
can sleep in it in peace when they know that it derives its mediocre pleasures from the work of millions of
dead souls?

I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.

Anyway it was an idea of mother's and she often used to repeat it, that you ended up getting used to everything.

It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule - of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis,
negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my
light.

We lead a difficult life, not always managing to fit our actions to the vision we have of the world. (And when I think I have caught a glimpse of the color of my fate, it flees from my gaze.) We struggle and suffer to reconquer our solitude. But a day comes when the earth has its simple and primitive smile. Then, it is as if the struggles and life within us were rubbed out. Millions of eyes have looked at this landscape, and for me it is like the first smile of the world. It takes me out of myself, in the deepest meaning of the expression. It assures me that nothing matters except my love, and that even this love has no value for me unless it remains innocent and free. It denies me a personality, and deprives my suffering of its echo. The world is beautiful, and this is everything. The great truth which it patiently teaches me is that neither the mind nor even the heart has any importance. And that the stone warmed by the stone or the cypress tree swelling against the empty sky set a boundary to the only world in which "to be right" has any meaning: nature without men. This world reduces me to nothing. It carries me to the very end. Without anger, it denies that I exist. And, agreeing to my defeat, I move toward a wisdom where everything has already been conquered -- except that tears come into my eyes, and this great sob of poetry which swells my heart makes me forget the truth of the world.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me
that is what I understand. And these two certainties
my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle
I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

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.

The only way out [of international dictatorship] is to place international law above governments, which means [ ... ] that there must be a parliament for making it, and that parliament must be constituted by means of worldwide elections in which all nations will take part.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.

Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.

Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.

Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

I know. I'm sorry. But weariness is a kind of madness. And there are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.

The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same seashore. But at least he who consents to his own return and to the return of all things, who becomes an echo and an exalted echo, participates in the
divinity of the world.

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

When the time to die comes, it does not matter how and when it happens.

If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death.

Here suicide and murder are two aspects of a single
system, the system of a misguided intelligence that prefers, to the suffering imposed by a limited
situation, the dark victory in which heaven and earth are annihilated.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it really didn't matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. "Do you want my life to be meaningless?" he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn't have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, "I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?" I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I'm not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. "You see, you see!" he said. "You do believe, don't you, and you're going to place your trust in Him, aren't you?" Obviously, I again said no. He fell back in his chair.

You only demand clarity because you're too comfortable within your vagueness

We are not so mad as to think that we shall create a world in which murder will not occur. We are fighting for a world in which murder will no longer be legal.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.

Irrational crime and rational crime, in fact, both equally betray the value brought to light by the
movement of rebellion. Let us first consider the former. He who denies everything and assumes the
authority to kill - Sade, the homicidal dandy, the pitiless Unique, Karamazov, the zealous supporters of
the unleashed bandit - lay claim to nothing short of total freedom and the unlimited display of human
pride. Nihilism confounds creator and created in the same blind fury. Suppressing every principle of hope,
it rejects the idea of any limit, and in blind indignation, which no longer is even aware of its reasons, ends
with the
conclusion that it is a matter of indifference to kill when the victim is already condemned to death.

Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

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.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgement but his own.

Don't let them tell us stories

There is but one freedom, To put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved, and not the reverse.

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.

But it takes a lot of money to live freely by the sea.

I wasn't even able to tell myself that it was hard to think those things.

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!

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

There are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye

I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.

That inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.

You alone will know why I killed myself. You know my principles. I hate those who commit suicide. Besause of what they do TO OTHERS. If you have to do it, you must disguise it. Out of kindness.

We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.

STEPAN: Innocence? Yes, maybe I know what that means. But I prefer to shut my eyes to it - and to shut others' eyes to it, for the time being - so that one day it may have a world-wide meaning. KALIAYEV: Well, you must feel very sure that day is coming if you repudiate everything that makes life worth living today, on its account. STEPAN: I am certain that that day is coming. KALIAYEV: No, you can't be as sure as that. ... Before it can be known which of us, you or I, is right, perhaps three generations will have to be sacrificed; there will have been bloody wars, and no less bloody revolutions. And by the time that all this blood has dried off the earth, you and I will long since have turned to dust.

Thus and thus only the Christian could face the problem squarely and, scorning subterfuge, pierce to the heart of the supreme issues, the essential choice. And his choice would be to believe everything, so as not be forced into denying everything.

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

Knowing we all gonna die makes life a joke

She turned towards me. Her hair had fallen over her eyes and she was laughing.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Others will appear, with more serious intentions, who, on the basis of
the same despairing nihilism, will insist on ruling the world. These are the Grand Inquisitors who
imprison Christ and come to tell Him that His method is not correct, that universal happiness cannot be
achieved by the immediate freedom of choosing between good and evil, but by the domination and
unification of the world. The first step is to conquer and rule. 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. The unity of all creation will
be achieved by every possible means, since everything is permitted. The Grand Inquisitor is old and tired,
for the knowledge he possesses is-bitter. He knows that men are lazy rather than cowardly and that they
prefer peace and death to the liberty of discerning between good and evil. He has pity, a cold pity, for the
silent prisoner whom history endlessly deceives. He urges him to speak, to recognize his misdeeds, and,
in one sense, to approve the actions of the Inquisitors and of the Caesars. But the prisoner does not speak.
The enterprise will continue, therefore, without him; he will be killed.

When you have an elevated spirit and a miserable heart, you write great things and do the poor.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart - that is where it must be sought.

Moreover, competition for foreign markets and the necessity for
larger and larger investments in raw materials, produce phenomena of concentration and accumulation.
First, small capitalists are absorbed by big capitalists who can maintain, for example, unprofitable prices
for a longer period. A larger and larger part of the profits is finally invested in new machines and
accumulated in the fixed assets of capital. This double movement first of all hastens the ruin of the middle
classes, who are absorbed into the proletariat, and then proceeds to concentrate, in an increasingly small
number of hands, the riches produced uniquely by the proletariat. Thus the proletariat increases in size in
proportion to its increasing ruin. Capital is now concentrated in the hands of only a very few masters,
whose growing power is based on robbery. Moreover, these masters are shaken to their foundations by
successive crises, overwhelmed by the contradictions of the system, and can no longer assure even mere
subsistence to their slaves, who then come to depend on private or public charity. A day comes,
inevitably, when a huge army of oppressed slaves find themselves face to face with a handful of
despicable masters. That day is the day of revolution. "The ruin of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

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.

With Napoleon and the Napoleonic philosopher
Hegel, the period of efficacy begins. Before Napoleon, men had discovered space and the universe; with
Napoleon, they discovered time and the future in terms of this world; and by this discovery the spirit of
rebellion is going to be profoundly transformed.

Murder is terribly exhausting.

How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.

And then came human beings; humans wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.

He wanted to diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed.

I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

That is the mission of the proletariat: to bring forth supreme dignity from supreme humiliation. Through its suffering
and its struggles, it is Christ in human form redeeming the collective sin of alienation. It is, first of all, the multiform
bearer of total negation and then the herald of definitive affirmation.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.

Animals, according to Hegel, have an immediate knowledge of the exterior world, a perception of the
self, but not the knowledge of self, which distinguishes man. The latter is only really born at the moment
when he becomes aware of himself as a rational being. Therefore his essential characteristic is selfconsciousness.

To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing.

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

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises.

Humans are creatures, who spent their lifes trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd

And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.

Find your happiness in yourself.

You have heard, of course, of those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil that attack the unwary swimmer by thousands and with swift little nibbles clean him up in a few minutes, leaving only an immaculate skeleton? Well, that's what their organization is. "Do you want a good clean life? Like everybody else?" You say yes, of course. How can one say no? "O.K. You'll be cleaned up. Here's a job, a family, and organized leisure activities." And the little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone. But I am unjust. I shouldn't say their organization. It is ours, after all: it's a question of which will clean up the other.

The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

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

…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

In this flowering of air this fertility of the heavens it seemed as if a mans one duty was to live and be happy.

The anachronism is the worst thing to use at the theatre.

Naturally they don't eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, sea-bathing, going to the pictures.

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.

As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla. Actually his god was an argument at a political meeting and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of speeches.

Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.

I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he got and that you should never play games.

Man wants to reign supreme through the revolution. But why reign supreme if nothing has any
meaning? Why wish for immortality if the aspect of life is so hideous? There is no method of thought
which is absolutely nihilist except, perhaps, the method that leads to suicide, any more than there is
absolute materialism.

For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.

In the other room Rateau was looking at the canvas, completely blank, in the center of which Jonas had merely written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read solitary or solidary.

Indeed, one had the impression that even for the sufferers the frantic terror of the early phase had passed, and there was a sort of mournful resignation in their present attitude toward the disease.