Quotes from Albert Camus

Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

Without work all life goes rotten.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

A work of art is a confession.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

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

Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.

A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

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

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we'd never be done with it.