Albert Camus Quotes

We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.

Never trust a man who has not a single redeeming vice.

Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.

Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

I couldn't get the laughter out of my head. It wasn't career. It wasn't even a choice. It was a calling.

I understand that we are actually complicated people but we are also dreadfully simple.

Your career is what you're paid for. Your calling is what you're made for.

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.

It is quite impossible to understand the character of a person from one action, however striking that action may be.

Personally I don't believe in bad people. I think there's always a reason for people acting badly.

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

Nature doesn't cheat - people do.

Think of your career as your ministry. Make your work an expression of love in service to mankind.

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

I always believed that I’d return to Cleveland and finish my career there.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another.

I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.