Quotes from Albert Camus

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Without freedom there is no art.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.

We all have a weakness for beauty.

The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.

There is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.