Quotes from Albert Camus

- "An actor lends more force to a tragic character the more careful he is not to exaggerate it." (from "The Myth of Sisyphus", 1942)

- "As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversations bore me, I pretended to agree." (from "The Stranger", 1942)

- "Gazing up at the stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." (from "The Stranger", 1942)

- "The hero of the book is condemned because he doesn't play the game ... If you ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn't play the game. The answer is simple. He refused to lie." (from "The Stranger", 1942)

- "Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death." (from "The Plague", 1947)

- "Jean Tarrou: It comes to this: what interests me is learning how to become a saint.

Bernard Rieux: But you don't believe in God.

Tarrou: Exaclty! Can one be a saint without God? - that's the problem, in fact the only problem. I'm up against today." (from "The Plague", 1947)

- "Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time?

Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while." (from "The Plague", 1947)

- "There can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness." (from "The Plague", 1947)

- "A maxim [is] an equation in which the elements of the first term reappear in the second, but in a different order." (from "Chamfort" in Sewanee Review, 1948)

- "[Chamfort's maxims] are sallies, flashes to insight, but not laws." (from "Chamfort" in Sewanee Review, 1948)

- "Nothing remains for us... but to be reborn or to die." (from "The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt", 1951)

- "All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State." (from "The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt", 1951)

- "Every revolution ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic." (from "The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt", 1951)

- "Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." (from "The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt", 1951)

- "Reality is a perpetual process of evolution, propelled by the fertile impact of antagonisms which are resolved each time into a superior synthesis which, itself, created its opposite and again causes history in advance." (from "The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt", 1951)

- "The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn." (from "The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt", 1951)

- "This world where only the stones are innocent." (from "The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt", 1951)

- "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." (from "Summer", 1954)

- "The welfare of the people... has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyrany a good conscience... The very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intelectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patrionism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom." (from "Homage to an Exile", 1955)

- "Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face." (from "The Fall", 1956)

- "Deabauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person." (from "The Fall", 1956)