Albert camus quotes

Find your happiness in yourself.

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.

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 had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.

To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.

There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.

That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3

We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

Life is the sum of your choices.

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

The Four Conditions of Happiness: Life in the open air, Love for another being,Freedom from ambition,Creation

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

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

Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Integrity has no need of rules.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

Having money is a way of being free of money.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

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

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

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. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.

After awhile you could get used to anything.

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

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

On certain mornings, as we turn a corner, an exquisite dew falls on our heart and then vanishes. But the freshness lingers, and this, always, is what the heart needs. The earth must have risen in just such a light the morning the world was born.

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

Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

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

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.

There is no shame in preferring happiness.

Where there is no hope, we must invent it.

Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

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

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

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.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Still, obviously, one can't be sensible all the time.

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

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.

We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.

The innocent is the person who explains nothing

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

We all have a weakness for beauty.

It is easy to shield the outer body from poisoned arrows, but it is impossible to shield the mind from the poisoned darts that originate within itself. Greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism - these four poisoned darts originate within the mind and infect it with deadly poison.

You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.

When there is no hope, one must invent hope.

We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.

You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.

Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.

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

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it's meaningless.

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

Life should be lived to the point of tears

Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?

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

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

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

Yes, everything is simple. It's people who complicate things.

Integrity needs no rules.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

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

I rebel; therefore I exist.

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.

Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.

If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

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

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

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

My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. Truly yours, Albert Camus

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.