Albert Camus

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

— Albert Camus

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.

— Albert Camus

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 artificial.

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.

— Albert Camus

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

— Albert Camus

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.

— Albert Camus

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

— Albert Camus

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

— Albert Camus

Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence [His Or Her] heart first opened.

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you dont help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

— Albert Camus

My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: Let us rejoice. Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths.

— Albert Camus

De romanwereld is niets anders dan een correctie op deze wereld, in navolging van het diepe verlangen van de mens.

— Albert Camus

In the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman

— Albert Camus