Quotes from Albert Camus

Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.

…there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.

Life is the sum of your choices.

The innocent is the person who explains nothing

...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

We have art in order not to die of life.

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.