Albert Camus

One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.

Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre, 30 June 1952., 1952

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.

Part 2: Metaphysical Rebellion, 1951

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

Variant translation: Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic., 1951

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Introduction, 1951

The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.

Part 2: Metaphysical Rebellion, 1951

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

Chapter 1, 1951

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.

"Historical Murder", as translated by Anthony Bower, 1951

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 don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Said at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg (1948); reported in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (translation by Justin O'Brien, 1961), p. 73, 1948

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.

"Helen's Exile" (1948), 1948

We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.

"Helen's Exile" (1948), 1948

We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.

"Helen's Exile" (1948), 1948

What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

"Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka", 1942

Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

"Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka", 1942

Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.

"Noces à Tipasa", 1938

Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.

"Entre oui et non" in L'Envers et l'endroit (1937), translated as "Between Yes and No", in World Review magazine (March 1950), also quoted in The Artist and Political Vision (1982) by Benjamin R. Barber and Michael J. Gargas McGrath, 1937