Albert Camus Quotes

I don't want to get into autobiographies; I don't want to talk about myself.

I'm tired of answering questions about myself.

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.

The world is a mirror for us – whatever you say about others is really how you feel about yourself.

There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

It’s hard to see the whole picture when you are in the frame.

Should you really open your eyes and see, you would behold your image in all images. And should you open your ears and listen, you would hear your own voice in all voices.

God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. But occasionally a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.

What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason.

Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.

Dislike in yourself what you dislike in others.

It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learned to see straight. They fumbled in the dark, and didn't quite know where they were, or what they were. Like men in a dark room, they only felt their existence surging in the darkness of other creatures. We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness.

I can talk about humility, but I'm not humble. I mean, if you say, I'm humble, you've just contradicted yourself. But I'm trying to be, man, I'm trying so hard.

Women see through each other, but they rarely look into themselves.

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.

The human race is inquisitive about other people's lives, but negligent to correct their own.

Self examination is the key to insight, which is the key to wisdom

If you don't look at yourself and evaluate it, you instead see how the world's reacting to it.

What we dislike in others is often a weakness in our own lives.

The best way to prove the clearness of our mind, is by showing its faults; as when a stream discovers the dirt at the bottom, it convinces us of the transparency and purity of the water.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!