Famous Albert Camus Quotations

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"I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day."
by Albert Camus
"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."
by Albert Camus
"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
by Albert Camus
"Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely."
by Albert Camus
"There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed."
by Albert Camus
"Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question."
by Albert Camus
"By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more."
by Albert Camus
"After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm."
by Albert Camus
"The society based on production is only productive, not creative."
by Albert Camus
"The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude."
by Albert Camus
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil."
by Albert Camus
"We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead."
by Albert Camus
"What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians."
by Albert Camus
"You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death."
by Albert Camus
"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
by Albert Camus
"Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference."
by Albert Camus
"Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature."
by Albert Camus
"Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence."
by Albert Camus
"In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist."
by Albert Camus
"Integrity has no need of rules."
by Albert Camus
"It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting."
by Albert Camus
"How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!"
by Albert Camus
"Live to the point of tears."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them."
by Albert Camus
"Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship--never."
by Albert Camus
"Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route."
by Albert Camus
"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world."
by Albert Camus
"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators."
by Albert Camus
"'It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."
by Albert Camus
"A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad."
by Albert Camus
"A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to bet better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse."
by Albert Camus
"A person I knew use to divide human beings into three categories Those who prefer 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."
by Albert Camus
"A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."
by Albert Camus
"A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."
by Albert Camus
"All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."
by Albert Camus
"An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself."
by Albert Camus
"As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by 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."
by Albert Camus
"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
by Albert Camus
"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"
by Albert Camus
"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads."
by Albert Camus
"Charm is getting the answer yes without asking a clear question."
by Albert Camus
"Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny."
by Albert Camus
"Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day."
by Albert Camus
"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic."
by Albert Camus
"Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better."
by Albert Camus
"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better"
by Albert Camus
"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better."
by Albert Camus
"Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way."
by Albert Camus
"He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool."
by Albert Camus
"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."
by Albert Camus
"History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God."
by Albert Camus
"How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."
by Albert Camus
"How many crimes are committed simply because their authors could not endure being wrong."
by Albert Camus
"I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness."
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."
by Albert Camus
"I love my country too much to be a nationalist."
by Albert Camus
"I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man he fornicated and read the papers."
by Albert Camus
"I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day"
by Albert Camus
"If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given tous fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth"
by Albert Camus
"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."
by Albert Camus
"If there is a sin against life, it consist perhaps not so much in despairing of life as hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. Albert Camus"
by Albert Camus
"If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one."
by Albert Camus
"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
by Albert Camus
"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer"
by Albert Camus
"In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer."
by Albert Camus
"In the depth of winter, I learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
by Albert Camus
"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
by Albert Camus
"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
by Albert Camus
"In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon."
by Albert Camus
"It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all."
by Albert Camus
"It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all"
by Albert Camus


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