Quotes from Albert Camus

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.

Danger makes men classical, and all greatness, after all, is rooted in risk.

Don't walk behind me I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Every insubordinate person, when he rises up against oppression, reaffirms thereby the solidarity of all men.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.

Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship--never.

He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

How many crimes are committed simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you dont help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

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

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.

The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country.

The need to be right -- the sign of a vulgar mind.

The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence cynicism.

The truth, as the light, makes blind.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem...

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.