Philosopher · French · 1913 – 1960 · 113 quotes
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
Albert Camus
Philosopher · French · 1913 – 1960
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
A man's 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.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
Integrity has no need of rules.
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
