Quotes By Albert Camus

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

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

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

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

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

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

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

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

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

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.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

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.

Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.

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.

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

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

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

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

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

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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.

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.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

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.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

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

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.