Quotes from Albert Camus

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

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

No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

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

Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.

So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.

The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it

I don't want to represent man as he is, but only as he might be.

In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.

"To think the way you do," he said smiling, "you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope." "On both, perhaps."

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

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

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

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

Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses.

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

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.

There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.

The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one