Albert Camus quotes:

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.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

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

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

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.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.

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.

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.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

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 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.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

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.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

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.

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.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.

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.

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.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

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

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

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

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

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

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

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

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

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

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

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

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

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

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.

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.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

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

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

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

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

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.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

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

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

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

But the heart has its own memory and I have forgotten nothing.

I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.

The only picture of Tarrou he would always have would be the picture of a man who firmly gripped the steering-wheel of his car when driving, or else the picture of that stalwart body, now lying motionless. Knowing meant that: a living warmth, and a picture of death.

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.

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."

If it were sufficent to love, things would be too easy."

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."

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted."

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

Je ne sais plus si je vis ou si je me souviens."

Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois.(I know of morality, it is football that I owe.)"

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-etre heir, je ne sais pas."

I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man."

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

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

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

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

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

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

A work of art is a confession.

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

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.

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

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.

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

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.

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

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.

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.

And I too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.

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

I know [my label], in any case: a double face, a charming Janus, and underneath, the house motto: "Be wary". On my business cards:"Jean-Baptiste Clamence, actor".

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.