Albert Camus

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.

We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

The truth, as the light, makes blind.

No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.

More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible.

I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.