Albert Camus Quotes

According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.

Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

Morality binds and blinds.

Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action.

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.

Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.

When you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.

You can't slice up morals.

Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existed—and never will

The very essence of our civilization is that we give a paramount place to morality in all our affairs, public or private.

It is good insofar as it is not evil.

It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any day. "Give them to others"-that's my motto.

In cases of this sort, let us say adultery, rightness and wrongness do not depend on committing it with the right woman at the right time and in the right manner, but the mere fact of committing such action at all is to do wrong.

Conscience is merely our own judgment of the right or wrong of our actions, and so can never be a safe guide unless enlightened by the word of God.

The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.