Albert Camus

For the first time, the first, 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.

The only way out [of international dictatorship] is to place international law above governments, which means [...] that there must be a parliament for making it, and that parliament must be constituted by means of worldwide elections in which all nations will take part.

We all have a weakness for beauty.

The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artifici

The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.

On certain mornings, as we turn a corner,<br />an exquisite dew falls on our heart<br />and then vanishes.<br />But the freshness lingers, and this, always,<br />is what the heart needs.<br />The earth must have risen in just such a light<br />the morning the world was born.

Suffering gives us no special rights.

The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.

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

Where there is no hope, we must invent it.

If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.

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.

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?

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.

To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation.

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

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

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.

I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?\' \'I don't know. My my code of morals, perhaps.\' \'Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?\' \'Comprehension.

Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.

That's the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can't love without self-love.

But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

Some are created to love, while the others - to live.