Albert Camus Quotes

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

Everything kind of has a message in it.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.

Being that can be understood is language.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

Everything means something.

For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .

You grow up trying to interpret, worshipping, visual symbols. It's a body-soaked imagery that you're looking at.

Problems are messages.