Albert Camus Quotes

La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent.

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.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

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

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds - a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

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.

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.