Albert Camus Quotes

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.

I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.

In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate, the nearer we arrive unto it.

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Even those of us who are very very aware are still so unaware. Everything's relative so that, the more you know, the more you know you don't know anything.

Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

The foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

I don't know what is truth,but I can tell you how to find it!

Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

First master the fundamentals.

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it's possible to understand something about truth.

I know all one can know when one knows nothing.

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.