Albert Camus Quotes

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

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.

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.

Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

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.

Reality is easy. It's deception that's the hard work.

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.

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

Truth, like light is dazzling. By contrast, untruth is a beautiful sunset that enhances everything.

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.

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

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.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

He who does not lie does not know what truth is.

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

You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to buy it.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

Lying and art are very allied. But after you lie, you get to the truth.

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.

There's a difference between a cheap lie and a beautiful lie.

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?

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.