Quotes from Albert Camus

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.

It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

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

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eter1nal youth.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.

Politics, and the fate of mankind, are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all, accept these things.

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

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

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

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.

... unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it.