"You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Albert Camus quotes (page 33 of 50)
985 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions."
Read quote
6 likes
"The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power."
Read quote
6 likes
"On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."
Read quote
6 likes
"Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents"
Read quote
6 likes
"There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules"
Read quote
6 likes
"And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep."
Read quote
6 likes
"Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions."
Read quote
6 likes
"What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly."
Read quote
6 likes
"Men die and they are not happy."
Read quote
6 likes
"All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State."
Read quote
6 likes
"Absurd- that is the light mind that establishes its own borders."
Read quote
6 likes
"The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation."
Read quote
6 likes
"What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?"
Read quote
6 likes
"Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics."
Read quote
6 likes
"Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I."
Read quote
6 likes
"Fate is not in man but around him"
Read quote
6 likes
"It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement."
Read quote
6 likes
"I conceived at least one great love in my life, of which I was always the object."
Read quote
6 likes
"Still, obviously, one can't be sensible all the time."
Read quote
6 likes