Albert Camus Quotes

I think there is, not in the sense that I enjoy it, but that it's an important question. It's the question, "Does the presence of pain mean God doesn't care? Does God not love me anymore?" I think that's a very common connection we tend to make. I see that a lot in my own life and in the lives of others.

Unconditional love is a lofty ideal, but unconditional hate is a fact well documented by history.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Love is strange, sometimes it makes you crazy, it can burn or break you down.

Now we have no God. We have had two: the old God that our fathers handed down to us, that we hated, and never liked; the new one that we made for ourselves, that we loved; but now he has flitted away from us, and we see what he was made of - the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and throned. Now we have no God.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and "consolers," offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil.

Love, the deadliest of all things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don't. But that isn't it, exactly. The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you God. Love: It will kill you and save you, both.

Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.

I guess the sacrifice of my dignity is the only thing that will save us now. The things I endure for love. The Fates laugh at my torment.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

There is nothing more humiliating than loving someone so much that you forgive the infidelities.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children. Between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.

Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men.... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!

Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.

I can't go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me.

In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature.

Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are.

And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! - But the great Faith is Love!