Quotes from Albert Camus

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

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

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

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

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

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

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

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

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

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

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

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

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

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.