Albert Camus Quotations

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

Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

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

Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.

A régime [Nazism] which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests. But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.

There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.

Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.

A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.

I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.