Albert Camus

Bekannte Zitate von Albert Camus

Don't walk behind me I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.

Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

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.

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

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

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.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

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

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

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

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.