Quotes by 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.

There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.

I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life. It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?

For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.

In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the suns and which will also be my deaths. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: theres nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.

Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him.

This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: “Let us rejoice.

They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

To create is to live twice.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa

How many crimes have been committed for no other reason than that the perpetrator could not bear being in the wrong!

But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone elses blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.

... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to mans awareness of it.

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.

Lets not worry. Its too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.