Albert Camus

To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.

Morality, when formal, devours.

As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.

Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.

From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.

Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.

I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Still, obviously, one can't be sensible all the time.

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.