Albert Camus Quotes

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

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

The actor's realm is that of the fleeting.

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

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.

The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.

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

"What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?"\n"I don't know. My... my code of morals, perhaps."\n"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?" "Comprehension."

Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.

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

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

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.