Quotes from Albert Camus

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

Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.

How hard it is, how bitter it is to become a man!

In order to exist, man must rebel.

Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.

There are more things to admire in men than to despise.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.

There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.

Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.

I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.

Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.

The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.

If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

Men die and they are not happy.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.

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.

You know, [women] do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.

A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.