Albert Camus Quotes

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

In cases of doubtful morality, it is usual to say is there any harm in doing this? This question may sometimes be best answered by asking ourselves another; is there any harm in letting it alone?

Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Where evil may be done, it is right to ponder; where only suffered, know the shortest pause is much too long.

Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

Conscience serves us especially to judge of the actions of others.

It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.

Immoral: Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If mans notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from and nowise dependent on, their consequences-then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. This isn’t a good idea. This isn’t right.” “There’s all kinds of right,” he murmured. “On the spectrum, we’re still in the safe zone.” ... “Definitely right. Usually right,” Patch continued. “Mostly right. Maybe right.

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

The result justifies the deed.

Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences.

It is safer to do most men harm than to do them too much good.

One way to determine if a view is inadequate is to check its consequences in particular cases, sometimes extreme ones, but if someone always decided what the result should be in any case by applying the given view itself, this would preclude discovering it did not correctly fit the case. Readers who hold they would plug in to the machine should notice whether their first impulse was not to do so, followed later by the thought that since only experiences could matter, the machine would be all right after all.

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

The first theme that every audience can get easily everywhere in the world is the theme of judgment. You are constantly judging if this character is doing something wrong or right, or the other character is doing something right or wrong.

Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

Besides reasoning about matters of fact, men also make moral judgements.

If I have taken the word, by any reason, it has been because I think it is grave to kill men, under the pretext that they are mistaken on the interpretation of some point, for we know that even the chosen ones are not exempt from sometimes being wrong.