Quotes By Albert Camus

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

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

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.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

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

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

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

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

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

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

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

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

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

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.

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

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

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

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

We are all special cases.

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

Integrity has no need of rules.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.

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

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

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.

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.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

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

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.