Quotes by Albert Camus

“To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?”

“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”

“You see, a person of my acquaintance used to divide people into three categories: those who would prefer to have nothing to hide than have to lie, those who would rather lie than have nothing to hide, and finally those who love both lies and secrets.”

“I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.”

“Hmmm... Scoundrel. I like the sound of that.”

“To give all, to sacrifice all without expecting to get anything inreturn--this is love.Cest cela lamour, tout donner, tout sacrifier sans espoir de retour.”

And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of ones work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

Nothing in life is worth,turning your back on,if you love it.

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.

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

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Live to the point of tears.

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

I have no idea whats awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.

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

A mans 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.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didnt understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasnt much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.