Albert Camus (1913-1960)

Albert Camus was a French philosopher, novelist, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history, and the first laureate in literature born in Africa. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall and The Rebel.

Quotes

You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Experience
Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.

Cowardice, Hope
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

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

Charm
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
If there is a sin against life, it consist perhaps not so much in despairing of life as hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. Albert Camus
A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.
A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to bet better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.

Happiness