Albert Camus Quotes

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

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

But thou that didst appear so fair To fond imagination, Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation.

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.

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

Success has always been a great liar.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

Things are not always as they seem.

Life is beautiful, but you don't have a clue.

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright, But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

Mine eyes Were not in fault, for she was beautiful; Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart, That thought her like her seeming. It had been vicious To have mistrusted her.

Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

People are like birds - from a distance, beautiful: from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

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.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

Illusion - or rather appearance, semblance - is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

Sometimes what we see, what's going on in front of us, isn't really what's happening.

One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.

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