Inspirational Quotes by Albert Camus — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

“Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.”

“Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?”

“The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.”

“Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.”

“since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?”

“I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”

“hope is awakened, given life, sustained, by the millions of individuals whose deeds and actions, every day, break down borders and refute the worst moments in history, to allow the truth—which is always in danger—to shine brightly, even if only fleetingly, the truth, which every individual builds for us all, created out of suffering and joy.”

“And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.”

“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.”

“What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.”

“l'homme se trouve devant l'irrationnel. Il sent en lui son désir de bonheur et de raison. L'absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l'appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.”

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

“You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.”

“It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.”

“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

“Ot minderimle kerevet tahtası arasında sanki kumaşa yapışmış nerdeyse saydamlaşmış bir gazete parçası buldum. Geçmiş bir polis olayını anlatıyordu. Baş tarafı yoktu. Ama, olay herhalde Çekoslovakya'da geçmiş olmalıydı. Adamın biri para kazanmak için bir Çek köyünden ayrılmış. Yirmi beş yıl sonra, zengin olarak, karısı ve bir çocuğuyle birlikte köyüne dönmüş. Annesi kız kardeşiyle birlikte, doğduğu köyde otel işletiyorlarmış. Adam onlara sürpriz yapmak için, karısıyla çocuğunu bir başka otele bırakıp annesinin oteline gitmiş. İçeriye girince annesi kendisini tanımamış. O da, şaka olsun diye bir oda tutmuş, paralarını da göstermiş. Geceleyin, annesiyle kız kardeşi, paralarını almak için kafasına çekiçle vura vura adamcağızı öldürmüşler, cesedini de nehre atmışlar. Sabahleyin, karısı gelip olup bitenden habersiz, yolcunun kim olduğunu söylemiş. Ana kendini asmış, kız kardeşi de kendini kuyuya atmış. Bu öyküyü binlerce kez okudum sanıyorum. Öykü bir yandan gerçeğe uymuyordu, bir yandan olağan bir şeydi. Kısacası, bana kalırsa, yolcu bunu biraz da hak etmişti. İnsan hiçbir zaman böyle oyun oynamamalı.”

“Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can an armistice for a mother bereaved of a son or for a man who buries his friend.”

“Qu'est-ce que le roman, en effet, sinon cet univers où l'action trouve sa forme, où les mots de la fin sont prononcés, les êtres livrés aux êtres, où toute vie prend le visage du destin. Le monde romanesque n'est que la correction de ce monde-ci, suivant le désir profond de l'homme. Car il s'agit bien du même monde. La souffrance est la même, le mensonge et l'amour. Les héros ont notre langage, nos faiblesses, nos forces. Leur univers n'est ni plus beau ni plus édifiant que le nôtre. Mais eux, du moins, courent jusqu'au bout de leur destin, et il n'est même jamais de si bouleversants héros que ceux qui vont jusqu'à l'extrémité de leur passion.[...] Voici donc un monde imaginaire, mais créé par la correction de celui-ci, un monde où la douleur peut, si elle le veut, durer jusqu'à la mort, où les passions ne sont jamais distraites, où les êtres sont livrés à l'idée fixe et toujours présents les uns aux autres. L'homme s'y donne enfin à lui-même la forme et la limite apaisante qu'il poursuit en vain dans sa condition. Le roman fabrique du destin sur mesure. C'est ainsi qu'il concurrence la création et qu'il triomphe, provisoirement, de la mort.”

“And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!”

“Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.”

“Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.”

“The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.”

“Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.”

“O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!”

“He had been bored, that's 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. Hurray then for funerals!”

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”

“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.”

“there are truths but no truth”

“Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”

“God is perhaps full of hatred and hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory; but the more hideous is his face, the more he asserts his power. His greatness is his incoherence. His proof is his inhumanity. One must spring into him and by this leap free oneself from rational illusions.”

“The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.”

“he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.”

“God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting cell, which a nation recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him in the cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true. to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human invention. They didn't need God for that little masterpiece.”

“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”

“Perhaps we do not love life enough.”

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”

“Can one be a saint without God?”

“I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.”

“Do you believe in God, doctor?”

“Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!”

“Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.”

“Between "everywhere" and "forever" there is no compromise.”

“I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one's secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown. My deepest joy is to write. To accept the world and to accept pleasure—but only when I am stripped bare of everything. I should not be worthy to love the bare and empty beaches if I could not remain naked in the presence of myself. For the first time I can understand the meaning of the word happiness without any ambiguity. It is a little different from what men normally mean when they say: 'i am happy.”

“I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say”

“No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.”

“If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.”

“To will is to stir up paradoxes”

“Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.”

“There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.”

“This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”

“We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.”

“There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.”

“To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.”

“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.”

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”

“If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.”

“Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”

“Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.”

“The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”

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

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”

“I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.”

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”

“It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.”

“Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.”

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”

“Live to the point of tears.”

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

“What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.”

“Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.”

““Nothing in life is worth,”

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”