Albert Camus Quotes

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep”
― Albert Camus

“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.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”
― Albert Camus

“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.”
― Albert Camus

“To create is to live twice.”
― Albert Camus

“My soul’s a burden to me, I’ve had enough of it. I’m eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don’t belong here.”
― Albert Camus

“We don't have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.”
― Albert Camus

“How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“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”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

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

“And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Despite men's suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of men isolated with their fate.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I was at ease in everything, to be sure, but at the same time satisfied with nothing. Each joy made me desire another. I went from festivity to festivity. On occasion I danced for nights on end, ever madder about people and life. At times, late on those nights when the dancing, the slight intoxication, my wild enthusiasm, everyone’s violent unrestraint would fill me with a tired and overwhelmed rapture, it would seem to me—at the breaking point of fatigue and for a second’s flash—that at last I understood the secret; I would rush forth anew. I ran on like that, always heaped with favors, never satiated, without knowing where to stop, until the day -- until the evening rather when the music stopped and the lights went out.”
― The Fall

“To will is to stir up paradoxes”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Ah ! cher ami, que les hommes sont pauvres en invention. Ils croient toujours qu'on se suicide pour une raison. Mais on peut très bien se suicider pour deux raisons. Non, ça ne leur entre pas dans la tête. Alors, à quoi bon mourir volontairement, se sacrifier à l'idée qu'on veut donner de soi ? Vous mort, ils en profiteront pour donner à votre geste des motifs idiots, ou vulgaires. Les martyrs, cher ami, doivent choisir d'être oubliés, raillés ou utilisés. Quant à être compris, jamais.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Tekerlekler üzerinde kayan zindanımın karanlığında, yorgunluğumun ta derinliklerinden gelişmişçesine, sevdiğim bir kentin, kendimi mutlu hissettiğim belli bir saatin bütün bu alışılmış gürültülerini eskisi gibi, bir bir bulur gibi oldum. Gerginliğini yitiren havada, gazete satıcılarının sesi, küçük parktaki son kuşların ötüşü, sandviç satıcılarının bağrışması, kentin yüksek dönemeçlerinde tramvayların çıkardığı iniltili gıcırtılar ve göğün daha gece limanın üzerine çökmeden önceki uğultusu, bütün bunlar benim için cezaevine düşmeden önce bildiğim gözü kapalı bir gezintiyi düzenliyordu. Evet, bu saat, bundan çok zaman önceleri, kendimi mutlu hissettiğim bir saatti. Beni o zamanlar bekleyen hep hafif ve deliksiz bir uykuydu. Ama yine de bir şeyler değişmişti. Yarını gözlerken kendimi yeniden hücremde buluverdim. Yaz göklerinde uzanıp giden o bildik yollar insanı günahsız uykulara da zindanlara da götürebiliyormuş demek. ”
― Albert Camus

“He gave me a strange look, as if he found me slightly disgusting.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Nevertheless I answered that I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself and that it was hard for me to tell him what he wanted to know.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I wanted to hear the murmur of its water again, to escape the sun and the strain and the women's tears, and to find shade and rest again at last.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I knew that it was stupid, that I wouldn't get the sun off me by stepping forward.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I was about to say that that was precisely because they were criminals. But then I realized that I was one too.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“From the day I got her letter (she told me she would no longer be allowed to come, because she wasn't my wife), from that day on I felt that I was at home in my cell and that my life was coming to a standstill there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“One day when the guard told me that I'd been in for five months, I believed it, but I didn't understand it. For me it was one and the same unending day that was unfolding in my cell and the same thing I was trying to do.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“But at the same time, and for the first time in months, I distinctly heard the sound of my own voice.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“[...] ...as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I didn't have the right to show any feeling or goodwill.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Para entender el mundo, uno tiene que alejarse de él en alguna ocasión”
― Albert Camus