Albert Camus

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

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

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

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

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

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.

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

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.

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.

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.

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

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

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

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

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering

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