Famous Quotes

Quotes by Albert Camus

• Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
• Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
• Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
• Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
• Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
• The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
• The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
• The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
• 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.
• There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
• Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
• Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
• To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
• 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.
• To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
• 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.
• To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
• To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
• 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.
• Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
• We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
• We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
• 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.
• We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
• 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.
• When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
• 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.
• Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
• Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
• You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
• 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.