albert Camus

“Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.”

“I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.”

“I love my country too much to be a nationalist.”

“I shall tell you a great secret, my friend.  Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.”

“I should like to be able to love my country and to love justice.”

“If there is a sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.”

“Let us call it by the name which, for lack of any other nobility, will at least give the nobility of truth, and let us recognize it for what it essentially is:  a revenge.”  (about capital punishment)

“More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism.”

“Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to what is present.”

“Some people talk in their sleep.  Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

“The law's final justification is in the good it does or fails to do to the society of a given place and time.”

“The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice.”

“There is only one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

“Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators.”

“We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages.  But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.”

“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.”