Quotes from Albert Camus

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.

Do you believe in God, doctor?" No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.

The absurd is sin without God.

Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.

My great idea is that we must forgive the Pope. First of all, he needs it more than anyone else. Besides, it is the only way of placing oneself above him.

Find your happiness in yourself.

There is no shame in preferring happiness.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

Happiness too is inevitable.

I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

All healthy men have thought of their own suicide

Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.

History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.