Quotes from Albert Camus

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

The absurd is clear reason recognizing its limits.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better....

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.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

For 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.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

For there to be equivalence [between a premeditated crime and a crime of "pure violence"], the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

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

A person I knew use to divide human beings into three categories Those who prefer have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.

A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself.