Albert Camus

Do not wait for the last judgement. It comes every day.

I don't want to be a genius - I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.

Can one be a saint without God? That’s the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterward.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

We are all exceptional cases.... Each man insists on being innocent, even if it means accusing the whole human race, and heaven.

There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive.

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

We get into the habit of living before, acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

[ Remarks at debate, University of Stockholm, 1957 :] I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

N’attendez pas le jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours .

La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux .

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier . Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. L’Étranger (The Stranger) pt. 1, ch. 1 (1942)

I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were, we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.

How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something.

We can t do without dominating others or being served. ... Even the man on the bottom rung still has his wife, or his child. If he’s a bachelor, his dog. The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.

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

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.

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.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

I know with certainty that a man s work is nothing but the long journey to recover, through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to his heart.

After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we’d never be done with it.

The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to slaves.

A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.