Albert Camus Quotes

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

The sins of teachers are the teachers of sin.

You cannot do wrong and feel right. It is impossible!

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

Conscience is the most dangerous thing you possess. If you wake it up, it may destroy you. To live a life of total moral rigor is not necessarily the way to go. It's the path for very few people. Most people need to come up with some kind of middle ground that satisfies their practical, moral, and philosophical esthetic needs.

What a man calls his 'conscience' is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

A little hypocrisy is better than losing.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

... sufficient conscience to bother him, but not sufficient to keep him straight.

What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions?

Men of most renowned virtue have by transgressing most truly kept the law.