By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway. - Albert Camus
We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear. - Albert Camus
You can't create experience, you undergo it. - Albert Camus
في بدء توقيفي كانت لدي أفكار رجل حر من ذلك أن الرغبة كانت تأخذني في أكون على شاطئ ...وبعد ذلك لم تعد لي سوى افكار سجين كنت انتظر النزهة اليومية أو زيارة المحامي - Albert Camus
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. - Albert Camus
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it. ~(Camus, as quoted by Tony Judt) - Albert Camus
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity. - Albert Camus
It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy. - Albert Camus
In the depth of winter, I learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. - Albert Camus
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. - Albert Camus
… I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger. - Albert Camus
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. - Albert Camus
Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois.(I know of morality, it is football that I owe.) - Albert Camus
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. - Albert Camus
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition. - Albert Camus
...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence? - Albert Camus
Peace is the only battle worth waging. - Albert Camus
I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say - Albert Camus
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. - Albert Camus
I know of only one duty, and that is to love. - Albert Camus
A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to bet better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse. - Albert Camus
In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. - Albert Camus
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. - Albert Camus
I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless. - Albert Camus
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it. - Albert Camus
Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été. - Albert Camus
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. - Albert Camus
A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. - Albert Camus
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true, and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. - Albert Camus
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. - Albert Camus
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. - Albert Camus
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. - Albert Camus
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. - Albert Camus
To create is to live twice. - Albert Camus
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist. - Albert Camus
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny. - Albert Camus
There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide. - Albert Camus
There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence. - Albert Camus
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
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. - Albert Camus
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. - Albert Camus
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. - Albert Camus
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. - Albert Camus
I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man. - Albert Camus
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. - Albert Camus
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. - Albert Camus
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things. - Albert Camus
What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others. - Albert Camus
Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'. - Albert Camus
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. - Albert Camus
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. - Albert Camus
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are. - Albert Camus
There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn. - Albert Camus
Nothing in life is worth,turning your back on,if you love it. - Albert Camus
Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day. - Albert Camus
We only know of one duty, and that is to love. - Albert Camus
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. - Albert Camus
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. - Albert Camus
The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding. - Albert Camus
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads. - Albert Camus
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul - Albert Camus
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. - Albert Camus
Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then. - Albert Camus
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart. - Albert Camus
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one. - Albert Camus
Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it. - Albert Camus
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; - Albert Camus
In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon. - Albert Camus
There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. - Albert Camus
It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear. - Albert Camus
Para el que ama el modo de emplear el tiempo del amado es el manantial de todas sus alegrías. - Albert Camus
Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate ? John Leonard - Albert Camus
If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one. - Albert Camus
Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder. - Albert Camus
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness. - Albert Camus
որևէ քաղաք ճանաչելու ամենաճիշտ ձևերից մեկն էլ իմանալն է, թե ինչպե՞ս են այնտեղ աշխատում, ինչպե՞ս են սիրում, և ինչպե՞ս են մեռնում: - Albert Camus
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine. - Albert Camus
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool. - Albert Camus
Having money is a way of being free of money - Albert Camus
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are myrevolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity ofconsciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitationto death—and I refuse suicide. - Albert Camus
Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable. - Albert Camus
Today, in the face of abjection and solitude, his heart said: 'No'. And in the great distress that washed over him, Mersault realised that his rebellion was the only authentic thing in him, and that everything elsewhere was misery and submission". - Albert Camus
What is a rebel? A man who says no. - Albert Camus
[A writer] cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it. - Albert Camus
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man. - Albert Camus
What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport. - Albert Camus
I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two. - Albert Camus
Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing. - Albert Camus
If there is a sin against life, it consist perhaps not so much in despairing of life as hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. Albert Camus - Albert Camus
Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement. - Albert Camus
Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions. - Albert Camus
Fate is not in man but around him - Albert Camus
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. - Albert Camus
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool. - Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules. - Albert Camus
Who taught you all this, doctor?"The reply came promptly:"Suffering. - Albert Camus
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. - Albert Camus
I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back. - Albert Camus
I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day. - Albert Camus
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend. - Albert Camus
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. - Albert Camus
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means. - Albert Camus
Don’t walk in front of me… I may not followDon’t walk behind me… I may not leadWalk beside me… just be my friend - Albert Camus
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. - Albert Camus
Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian. - Albert Camus
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. - Albert Camus
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. - Albert Camus
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. - Albert Camus
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history. - Albert Camus
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours. - Albert Camus
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question. - Albert Camus
Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything. - Albert Camus
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep - Albert Camus
The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself. - Albert Camus
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men. - Albert Camus
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? - Albert Camus
... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive. - Albert Camus
Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the inteligent or the dull. - Albert Camus
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are. - Albert Camus
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. - Albert Camus
When a man has learned how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn. - Albert Camus
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day. - Albert Camus
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them. - Albert Camus
What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly. - Albert Camus
Don't let them tell us stories - Albert Camus
Live to the point of tears. - Albert Camus