Quotes by Albert Camus

Having money is a way of being free of money

But the heart has its own memory and I have forgotten nothing.

It is not true that the heart wears out — but the body creates this illusion.

What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and mens eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it.

A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is dense, sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

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; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.

The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.

Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love.

The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”But I wonder if there’s no breaking then there’s no healing, and if there’s no healing then there’s no learning. And if there’s no learning then there’s no struggle. But the struggle is a part of life. So must all hearts be broken?

In a certain sense it might well be said that his was an exemplary life. He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to. Without a blush he confessed to dearly loving his nephews and sister, his only surviving near relation, whom he went to France to visit every other year. He admitted that the thought of his parents, whom he lost when he was very young, often gave him a pang. He did not conceal the fact that he had a special affection for a church bell in his part of the town which started pealing very melodiously at about five every afternoon.

He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they dont really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a womans bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise?

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasnt mine anymore, but one in which Id found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Maries dresses and the way she laughed.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.