Albert Camus Quotes

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Marilyn Monroe wasn't even her real name, Charles Manson isn't his real name, and now, I'm taking that to be my real name. But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

I think people need fantasy, but I think they also need to know that they're not being lied to. I think sometimes the fantasy can betray people and become more difficult for people's lives than just truth. I can't stand delusion. Delusion makes me sick.

I am far from sure when I am acting and when I am not or, should I more frankly put it, when I am lying and when I am not. For what is acting but lying and what is good acting but convincing lying?

They who imagine truth in untruth and see untruth in truth will never arrive at the truth.

Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.

No lie can live forever.

It is easier to be mistaken about the true than the beautiful.

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

Truth wasn't something you went out and found. It was wide and vast and deep and unending, and all you could hope to see was a tiny part of it. And to see that part and to mistake it for the whole was to make of Truth a lie.

La ve rite , comme la lumie' re, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau cre puscule qui met chaque objet en valeur. Truth, like light, blinds. A lie, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight which shows the value of each object.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

Only the right name gives beings and things their reality. A wrong name makes everything unreal. That's what lies do.