Albert Camus

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

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.

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

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

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.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.