Quotes & Sayings About Camus

What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. — Albert Camus

For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference. — Albert Camus

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

After that, everything seemed to happen so fast, so deliberately, so naturally that I don't remember any of it anymore. — Albert Camus

Why indeed should we carry on and why should we return? Our cup runneth over, and a mute, invincible madness rocks us to sleep. A day comes like this which draws everything to a close; we must then let ourselves sink, like those who swim until exhausted. What do we accomplish? — Albert Camus

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future. — Albert Camus

Everything seems futile here except the sun, our kisses, and the wild scents of the earth. ... Here, I leave order and moderation to others. The great free love of nature and the sea absorbs me completely. — Albert Camus

In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible. — Albert Camus

Poverty is a fortress without drawbridges. — Albert Camus

Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends! — Albert Camus

The truth is I wasn't brought into the world to write newspaper articles. But it's quite likely I was brought into the world to live with a woman. — Albert Camus

The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same seashore. But at least he who consents to his own return and to the return of all things, who becomes an echo and an exalted echo, participates in the
divinity of the world. — Albert Camus

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture. — Albert Camus

They always think one
commits suicide for a reason. But it is quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what is the good of dying
intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or
vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs,cherami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood
never! Besides,
let us not beat about the bush; I love life
that is my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life. Such avidity has
something plebeian about it, don't you think? — Albert Camus

Murder, of course, is not recommended for its own sake. But it is implicit in
the value - supreme for the romantic - attached to frenzy. Frenzy is the reverse of boredom — Albert Camus

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. — Albert Camus

A fate is not a punishment. — Albert Camus

Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart - that is where it must be sought. — Albert Camus

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. — Albert Camus

[As part of Camus' refusal to debate his political enemies publicly after their vitriolic responses to the publication of 'The Rebel'] At this point, the least sentence I might say will be used in a way that disgusts me in advance ... It would be impossible for me in that case to continue expressing myself with academic politeness. I am mistaken for a deliberately polite man whom one may insult in all safety. — Olivier Todd

The feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. — Albert Camus

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future. — Albert Camus

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. — Albert Camus

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

There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence. — Albert Camus

Reality is a perpetual process of
evolution, propelled by the fertile impact of antagonisms which are resolved each time into a superior
synthesis which, itself, creates its opposite and again causes history to advance. What Hegel affirmed
concerning reality advancing toward the spirit, Marx affirms concerning economy on the march toward
the classless society; everything is both itself and its opposite, and this contradiction compels it to become
something else. Capitalism, because it is bourgeois, reveals itself as revolutionary and prepares the way
for communism. — Albert Camus

Morality, when formal, devours. — Albert Camus

When a man has learned how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn. — Albert Camus

but he was afraid of being insincere and telling lies in the presence of death. It was on a fine winter's day, shot through with sunlight. In the pale blue sky, you could sense the cold all spangled with yellow. The cemetery overlooked the town, and you could see the fine transparent sun setting in the bay quivering with light, like a moist lip. — Albert Camus

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly. — Albert Camus

Day after day, Mersault let himself sink into his life as if he were sliding into water. And just as the swimmer advances by the complicity of his arms and the water which bears him up, helps him on, it was enough to make a few essential gestures - to rest one hand on a tree trunk, to take a run on the beach - in order to keep himself intact and conscious. — Albert Camus

Start by looking for what is valid in every human being. — Albert Camus

And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. — Albert Camus

They went on living in poverty, though they were no longer in need, but they were set in their ways, and they looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign that it was carrying it. — Albert Camus

For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. — Albert Camus

There lay the real danger; for the energy they devoted to fighting the disease made them all the more liable to it. — Albert Camus

There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive. — Edwidge Danticat

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. — Albert Camus

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage — Albert Camus

In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth. — Albert Camus

Rebellion is born of the spectacle of
irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. But its blind impulse is to
demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral. It protests, it demands, it
insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands
should henceforth be founded on rock. Its preoccupation is to transform. But to transform is to act, and to
act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate. Rebellion engenders
exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its
reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere. It must consent to examine itself in order to
learn how to act. — Albert Camus

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear ... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. — Albert Camus

I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl. — Albert Camus

The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. — Albert Camus

I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness. — Albert Camus

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. — Albert Camus

My moral code is no more or less than my likes and dislikes. — Albert Camus

There is do much sttuborn hope in a human heart. — Albert Camus

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray. — Albert Camus

That's all for today, Monsieur Antichrist. — Albert Camus

Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said. — Albert Camus

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. — Albert Camus

He's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while. — Albert Camus

The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial. — Albert Camus

No doubt, our love persisted, but in practice it served nothing; it was an inert mass within us, sterile as crime of a life sentence. It had declined on a patience that led nowhere, a dogged expectation. — Albert Camus

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. - ALBERT CAMUS — Kristin Hannah

Men cry because things are not what they ought to be. — Albert Camus

So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really-I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. — Albert Camus

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world. — Albert Camus

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other. — Albert Camus

I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good. — Albert Camus

And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world. — Albert Camus

Marx is only anti-capitalist
in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of
history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism,
discipline, force. — Albert Camus

It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle. — Albert Camus

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read. — Michiko Kakutani

I was an idle king and my chariot dawdled; I waited for the sea but it never came. — Albert Camus

There was only one thing that interested her and that was getting into bed with men whenever she'd the chance. And I warned her straight. 'You'll be sorry one day, my girl, and wish you'd got me back'. — Albert Camus

We live in a world where one needs to choose - to be the victim or the executioner, and nothing else. — Albert Camus

Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I'm grown-up, I don't feel like myself anymore.'
I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can't be something that, despite my best efforts, I've been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I'll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent. I wasn't fooling myself. — Hannah Moskowitz

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue. — Albert Camus

The fountain-head of rebellion, on the contrary, is the principle of
superabundant activity and energy. — Albert Camus

No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait. — Albert Camus

She described how Camus's aphorism "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" helps her fight back against unproductive feelings of meaninglessness.
If we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, we can see that he is smiling. He is content in his task of defying the Gods, the journey more important than the goal. To achieve a beginning, a middle, an end, a meaning to the chaos of creation - that's more than any deity seems to manage: But it's what writers do. So I tidy the desk, even polish it up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start.
As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. And even while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. What the hell, start again. Rewrite. Be of good cheer. Smile on, Sisyphus! — Fay Weldon

Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist's waiting room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one's balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one's seat; etc. — Albert Camus

Liberty coincides with heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, the bow bent to the breaking-point. — Albert Camus

I know that heaven, which was indifferent to your horrible victories, will be equally indifferent to your just defeat. — Albert Camus

Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity - happiness was human, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes. — Albert Camus

Aren't you sentient human beings? Or are you living like animals for the moment only? In that case by all means indulge in charity and cure each petty suffering that meets your eye; but don't meddle with the revolution, for its task is to cure all sufferings present and to come. — Albert Camus

Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence. — Albert Camus

One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself. — Albert Camus

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. — Albert Camus

It was plague. We've had the plague here.' You'd almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what does that mean
'plague'? Just life, no more than that. — Albert Camus

Life is crammed with events that encourage us to want to get old. — Albert Camus

They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives. — Albert Camus

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders. — Albert Camus

Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down ... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical. — Albert Camus

My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude. — Albert Camus

every night, when he didn't want to be alone, or to age or die, with that set expression he assumed which she occasionally recognized on other men's faces, the only common expression of those madmen hiding under an appearance of wisdom until the madness seizes them and hurls them desperately toward a woman's body to bury in it, without desire, everything terrifying that solitude and night reveals to them. — Albert Camus

I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it is a fact one doesn't come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That's why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim's side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how on attains to the third category; in other words, to peace. — Albert Camus

The town was peopled with sleepwalkers, whose trance was broken only on the rare occasions when at night their wounds, to all appearance closed, suddenly reopened. Then, waking with a start, they would run their fingers over the wounds with a sort of absentminded curiosity, twisting their lips, and in a flash their grief blazed up again, and abruptly there rose before them the mournful visage of their love. In the morning they harked back to normal conditions, in other words, the plague. — Albert Camus

And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage. — Albert Camus

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche. That
is true, but no artist can get along without reality. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of
the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.
Rebellion can be observed here in its pure state and in its original complexities. Thus art should give us a
final perspective on the content of rebellion. — Albert Camus

I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers.
(1945) — Albert Camus

People don't love each other at our age, Marthe - they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is. — Albert Camus

You do not have to unburden your soul for everyone; it will be enough if you do that for those you love. — Albert Camus

Talking of politics, I would like to reiterate that Arabs are people. By that I mean they are not merely an anonymous mass of peasants with nothing worth fighting for, as the Western world sees them. On the contrary, they are people with great traditions and the highest values, for all our reluctance to assess them impartially. — Albert Camus

Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom. — Albert Camus

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible. — Albert Camus

To-day the truth is a command. — Albert Camus

Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath. — Albert Camus