Albert Camus Quotes

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep

For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

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

My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

Truly yours,
Albert Camus”

I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.

Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

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

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

Avoir de l'argent c'est se libérer de l'argent.

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

I'm glad to know he's [Paneloux] better than his sermon.