Famous Quotes

Quotes 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.
• A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
• A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
• A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
• 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.
• Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
• Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
• 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.
• All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
• An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
• As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
• Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
• 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.
• Blessed are the hearts that can bend they shall never be broken.
• But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
• By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
• Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
• He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
• How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
• I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
• I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
• In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
• It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
• It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
• It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
• Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
• Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
• Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
• Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.