God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Sympathy
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.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Relationships
We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Perfection
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Solitude, Weight
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Revolution
When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Mankind, Man
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Tyranny
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Passion
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Virtue, Virtues
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all—he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Revolution, Peace
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Government
Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked or made use of. As for being understood, never.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Understanding
That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Communication
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Art
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Philosophy
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
—Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Character, Integrity, Honesty
Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Obedience, Violence
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Creativity, Life, To Be Born Everyday
If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Nature
The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
—Albert Camus
Topics: World
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.
—Albert Camus
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Pride, Defects
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Peace
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Forgiveness
The absurd is sin without God.
—Albert Camus
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Spring, Autumn, One liners
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.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Politics
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and just be my friend.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Follow, Friendship, Friend, Feelings, Friends, Now
To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?
—Albert Camus
Topics: Injury
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
- Simone de Beauvoir French Philosopher
- Henri Bergson French Philosopher
- Voltaire French Philosopher, Author
- Denis Diderot French Philosopher, Writer
- Octave Mirbeau French Author
- Michel Foucault French Philosopher
- Andre Gide French Novelist
- Michel de Montaigne French Essayist
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon French Philosopher
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