Quotes from Albert Camus

The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.

Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

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

You can't create experience, you undergo it.

Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.

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