Albert Camus

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”

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

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

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

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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