Albert Camus Quotes
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future -- and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.
The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom "charitable" souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and "historical tasks" is an actual or potential assassin.
Too many have dispensed with generosity to practice charity.
Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.
At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities.... And, above all, accept these things.
To those who despair of everything, reason cannot provide a faith but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
Autumn is a second spring
when every leaf's a flower.
An achievement is a bondage. It
obliges one to a higher achievement.
The suffering of little children is not what is so intolerable, but the fact that it is undeserved.
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it -- just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same seashore.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone.
I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prisons as to innocent, untroubled sleep.