Quotes from Albert Camus

Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.

The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.

More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.

There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man's courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don't just wait for a man to come along. That's the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

To remain a man in today's world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.

Rule: Start by looking for what is valid in every man.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.

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.