Quotes by Albert Camus

“What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.”

“Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.”

“What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.”

“Jécoutais mon cœur. Je ne pouvais imaginer que ce bruit qui maccompagnait depuis si longtemps pût jamais cesser.”

“Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasnt as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!”

“I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.”

“The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where Id been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.”

“lhomme se trouve devant lirrationnel. Il sent en lui son désir de bonheur et de raison. Labsurde naît de cette confrontation entre lappel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.”

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”

“… 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.”

“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”

“Theres the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.”

“Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.”

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”

“As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.”

“What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.”