Quotes from Albert Camus

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

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

In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.

Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.

My life was lucky so that I met, I loved (and disappointed) only outstanding people.

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

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.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.