Famous Quotes

Quotes by Albert Camus

• 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.