Albert Camus

"Love is the most natural thing in the world, yet the hardest to understand."

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, but to love wisdom and to live accordingly."

"Ambition and love are the wings to great deeds."

"I understand then why the men who insist on being free feel such passion."

"The only thing your education should make you is free."

"Beware of those who believe in the absolute power of words."

"Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference."

"There can be no history without human will."

"To abandon oneself to principles is really to abandon oneself."

"An artist's duty is not to succumb to despair, but to persist in creating meaning."

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."

"Without culture and relative freedom, society is not worth preserving."

"The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it."

"There is a divine beauty in learning, just as there is in a great strategy in war."

"The world demands and abhors excess; but the life of true meaning requires it."

"Men do not die for their political systems, but for their dreams of freedom."

"To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects the freedom of others."

"The great courage is to be modest and brave at the same time."

"Knowing that everything dies is the only way to love what we have."

"In a universe without meaning, we create meaning through our choices."

"The only knowledge worth having is that which teaches you how to live."

"Suicide is the acknowledgment of defeat, but life is the promise of renewal."

"To become a man, one must reject the convenient illusions of childhood."

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it."

"The absurd is the only new thing we have created this century."

"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse."

"The essential concept is absurdity, yet we must imagine ourselves as happy."

"Morality is not inherited. One cannot bequeath it or buy it, but one can invoke it."

"To spend one's life creating is not without merit, even if creation amounts to nothing."