Albert Camus

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.

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.

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

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.

I used to advertise my loyalty and I dont believe there is a single person I loved that I didnt eventually betray.

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

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.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

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

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

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.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf's a flower.

That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.

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

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.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

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

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

An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

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

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

We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

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

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

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

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

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.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.

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

What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

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

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

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.

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.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

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

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

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

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

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.

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

It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

Marxism is not scientific: At best, it has scientific prejudices.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.

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

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

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.

No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

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

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

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

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

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.

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

Lying is not only saying what isnt 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.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

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 is no more futile punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

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

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

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

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.

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

Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

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

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.

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

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

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

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

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

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.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.