Albert Camus quotes

Albert Camus
French

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

For years I’ve wanted to live according to everyone else’s morals. I’ve forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth–after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.

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

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

There is not love of life without despair about life.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.

Live to the point of tears.

Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.

To create is to live twice.

I’ve been thinking it over for years. While we
loved each other we didn’t need words to make ourselves understood. But people don’t
love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only
I couldn’t.” – Grant

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.

We don’t have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.

When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.

Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn’t feel it.

The loves we share with a city are often secret loves.

C’est cela l’amour, tout donner, tout sacrifier sans espoir de retour.

Books by Albert Camus:

The Fall

The Stranger

The Myth of Sisyphus.
De mythe van Sisyphus. (Nederlands)

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The Plague