Albert Camus Quotes

The reactionary suicide is ‘wise,’ and the revolutionary suicide is a ‘fool,’ a fool for the revolution in the way Paul meant when he spoke of being a ‘fool for Christ,’ That foolishness can move mountains of oppression; it is our great leap and our commitment to the dead and the unborn.

You think I led him on? For what? Kicks? I don't have enough exictement in my life, so maybe I'll tease a nice guy, get his hopes up, then laugh and skip away?

Self-esteem and identity are very fragile things. I think a lot of times, those are the motivations for why people do take their own lives - not being seen, not being recognized, not being loved, not feeling supported, not feeling understood.

Do not cherish suffering. Don't act like a fool. Don't think that your suffering is going to accelerate your spiritual progress.

I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

I can't do anything about how people who are all but completely unaware of my actual motivations and my actual thought process and my actual worldview, how they characterize me. There's not much I can do about it, except never say another word other than 'there's a ground ball to shortstop.' And I don't think that's going to happen.

The greatest fool is he who thinks he is not one and all others are.

Suicide to them is an act of selfishness. Someone who is truly selfless does not think of himself often enough to desire death.

Self-sacrifice usually contains an unspoken demand for payment.

I think when you make a movie, one of your main focuses as a director is to inspire everyone else to give their best. Like manipulation.

Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.

I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

He who thinks himself wise, O heavens! is a great fool.

What do you live for? Would you die for it?

If we make sacrifices in doing good or in doing ill, it does not alter the ultimate value of our actions; even if we stake our life in the cause, as martyrs do for the sake of our church : it is a sacrifice to our longing for power, or for the purpose of conserving our sense of power.

...a man does not die for business, but for ideals.

You kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you're gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. In the end, it does nothing. Nothing changes. The world goes on and you're gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.

The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?

The terrorists, they have the wrong perception. They believe that the other group is trying to destroy them as a religion, as a civilization. So they want to abolish us, to kill us before we can kill them. And the antiterrorist may think very much the same way - that these are terrorists and they are trying to eliminate us, so we have to eliminate them first. Both sides are motivated by fear, by anger, and by wrong perception.

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

Cause Jesus I do think did exist, and he was, I think, a guy who had interesting ideas in the Gandhi-type area, in the Nelson Mandela-type area, you know, relaxed and groovy; and the Romans thought, Relaxed and groovy?! No, no, no, no, no! So they murdered him. And kids eat chocolate eggs, because of the color of the chocolate, and the color of the... wood on the cross. Well, you tell me! It's got nothing to do with it, has it?

When I'm killed, don't think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there's one thing that I know well, I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!

They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.

Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.