Quotes by 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.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

Dont lies eventually lead to the truth? And dont all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Dont they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Lying is not only saying what isnt 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.

Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldnt have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.

False judges are held up in the world’s admiration and I alone know the true ones.

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

What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting cell, which a nation recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him in the cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true. to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human invention. They didnt need God for that little masterpiece.

The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.

...he said firmly, God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble. Obviously, I replied, they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it. I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: God is great and good. Come unto Him. On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.

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.

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

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moments human suffering

Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.