Misattributed Albert Camus Quotes

Don't walk in front of me ... I may not follow
Don't walk behind me ... I may not lead
Walk beside me ... just be my friend ~ Albert Camus

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience ~ Albert Camus

The simplifications of hatred and prejudice, which embitter and perpetuate the Algerian conflict, must be combated on a daily basis, and one man cannot do the job alone. What is required is a movement, a supportive press, and constant action. ~ Albert Camus

Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments. ~ Albert Camus

I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It's not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity.
Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy.
The miracle of not having to talk about oneself. ~ Albert Camus

In "The Myth of Sisyphus", his most important non-fiction work, Albert Camus suggested that if we believed what most people claim to be the purpose of life, we would feel compelled to commit suicide. If, however, we accept that life has no purpose we would be inclined to soldier on in a cussed, stoical manner like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up a hill only to see it roll down again. ~ Philip French

The most pure form of the movement of rebellion is thus crowned with the heart-rending cry
of Karamazov: if all are not saved, what good is the salvation of one only? ~ Albert Camus

I asked what sort of 'trouble' we might expect. That he couldn't say; disasters always come out of the blue. ~ Albert Camus

Fascism wants to establish the advent of the Nietzschean superman.
It immediately discovers that God, if He exists, may well be this or that, but He is primarily the master of
death. If man wants to become God, he arrogates to himself the power of life or death over others.
Manufacturer of corpses and of sub-men, he is a sub-man himself and not God, but the ignoble servant of
death ~ Albert Camus

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. ~ Albert Camus

In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise. ~ Albert Camus

At Padovani Beach the dance hall is open every day. And in that huge rectangular box with its entire side open to the sea, the poor young people of the neighborhood dance until evening. Often I used to await there a a moment of exceptional beauty. During the day the hall is protected by sloping wooden awnings. When the sun goes down they are raised. Then the hall is filled with an odd green light born of the double shell of the sky and the sea. When one is seated far from the windows, one sees only the sky and, silhouetted against it, the faces of the dancers passing in succession. Sometimes a waltz is being played, and against the green background the black profiles whirl obstinately like those cut-out silhouettes that are attached to a phonograph's turntable. Night comes rapidly after this, and with it the lights. But I am unable to relate the thrill and secrecy that subtle instant holds for me. I recall at least a magnificent tall girl who had danced all afternoon. She was wearing a jasmine garland on her right blue dress, wet with perspiration from the small of her back to her legs. She was laughing as she danced and throwing back her head. As she passed the tables, she left behind her a mingled scent of flowers and flesh. When evening came, I could no longer see her body pressed tight to her partner, but against her body alternating spots of white jasmine and black hair, and when she would throw back her swelling breast I would hear her laugh and see her partner's profil ~ Albert Camus

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. ~ Albert Camus

But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice. ~ Albert Camus

When the meaning of life has been suppressed, there still remains life. "I live," says Ivan, "in spite of logic." And again: "If I no longer had any faith in life, if I doubted a woman I loved, or the universal order of things, if I were persuaded, on the contrary, that everything was only an infernal and accursed chaos - even then I would want to live." Ivan will live,
then, and will love as well "without knowing why." But to live is also to act. To act in the name of what?
If there is no immortality, then there is neither reward nor punishment. "I believe that there is no virtue
without immortality." And also: "I only know that suffering exists, that no one is guilty, that everything is
connected, that everything passes away and equals out." But if there is no virtue, there is no law:
"Everything is permitted. ~ Albert Camus

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is. ~ Albert Camus

So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming. ~ Albert Camus

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. ~ Albert Camus

Life is not easy, but there would be religion, art, love that we sustain ourselves with. ~ Albert Camus

Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim. ~ Albert Camus

The life of the body, reduced to its
essentials, paradoxically produces an abstract and gratuitous universe, continuously denied, in its turn, by
reality. This type of novel, purged of interior life, in which men seem to be observed behind a pane of
glass, logically ends, with its emphasis on the pathological, by giving itself as its unique subject the
supposedly average man. In this way it is possible to explain the extraordinary number of "innocents"
who appear in this universe. The simpleton is the ideal subject for such an enterprise since he can only be
defined - and completely defined - by his behavior. He is the symbol of the despairing world in which
wretched automatons live in a machine-ridden universe, which American novelists have presented as a
heart-rending but sterile protest. ~ Albert Camus

Art does not
belong to all times; it is determined, on the contrary, by its period, and expresses, says Marx, the
privileged values of the ruling classes. ~ Albert Camus

The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves. ~ Albert Camus

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. ~ Albert Camus

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. ~ Albert Camus

If it were sufficent to love, things would be too easy. ~ Albert Camus

An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels - his irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. ~ Albert Camus

Even the head of the military power of a civilized State
must envy the head of the clan whom patriarchal society surrounded with voluntary respect, not with
respect imposed by the club." Moreover, Engels has firmly established that the concept of the State and
the concept of a free society are irreconcilable. "Classes will disappear as ineluctably as they appeared.
With the disappearance of classes, the State will inevitably disappear. The society that reorganizes
production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers will
relegate the machine of State to the place it deserves: to the museum of antiquities, side by side with the spinningwheel
and the bronze ax. ~ Albert Camus

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

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

I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don't really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman's bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise? ~ Albert Camus

Long reflection on the condition of mankind as people
sentenced to death only leads to the justification of crime. Ivan simultaneously hates the death penalty
(describing an execution, he says furiously: "His head fell, in the name of divine grace") and condones
crime, in principle. Every indulgence is allowed the murderer, none is allowed the executioner. This
contradiction, which Sade swallowed with ease, chokes Ivan Karamazov. ~ Albert Camus

He asked me why I had put Maman in the home. I answered that it was because I didn't have the money to have her looked after and cared for. He asked me if it had been hard on me, and I answered that Maman and I didn't expect anything from each other anymore, or from anyone else either, and that we had both gotten used to our new lives. ~ Albert Camus

Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities. ~ Albert Camus