“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.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.”
– Albert Camus
“There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.”
– Albert Camus
“The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.”
– Albert Camus
“Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.”
– Albert Camus
“A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.”
– Albert Camus
“Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.”
– Albert Camus
“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
– Albert Camus
“It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.”
– Albert Camus
“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
– Albert Camus
“To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.”
– Albert Camus
“To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.”
– Albert Camus
“You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”
– Albert Camus
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.”
– Albert Camus
“There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.”
– Albert Camus
“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.”
– Albert Camus
“Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.”
– Albert Camus
“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.”
– Albert Camus