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| Albert Camus: born November 1913 died January 1960 was a renowned French author and philosopher |
Quotes by Albert Camus
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.
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.
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and your seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
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.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
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.
Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.
Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we'd never be done with it.
We were born at the beginning of the First World War. As adolescents, we had the crisis of 1929, at twenty, Hitler. Then came the Ethiopian war, the civil war in Spain, and Munich. Next came the Second World War. Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in?
We can't do without dominating others or being served…. The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.
It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.
Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.
There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Too many have dispensed with generosity to practice charity.
Freedom is nothing else but the chance to do better.
I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Without work all life goes rotten.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
