There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
— Albert Camus
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.
To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?
Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.
I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
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.
To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.
Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.
How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
