Albert Camus Quotes & Sayings

There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide. — Albert Camus

Life is the sum of all choices — Albert Camus

Why indeed should we carry on and why should we return? Our cup runneth over, and a mute, invincible madness rocks us to sleep. A day comes like this which draws everything to a close; we must then let ourselves sink, like those who swim until exhausted. What do we accomplish? — Albert Camus

This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. — Albert Camus

To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation. — Albert Camus

Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star ... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them. — Albert Camus

Art does not tolerate reason. — Albert Camus

But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow. — Albert Camus

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home? — Albert Camus

Yes, everything is simple. It's people who complicate things. — Albert Camus

I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject. — Albert Camus

Nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at the time — Albert Camus

We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity. — Albert Camus

The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.'
This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire - and it belonged to Marie. — Albert Camus

There are more things to admire in men then to despise. — Albert Camus

Then she said she wondered if she really loved me or not. I, of course, couldn't enlighten her as to that. And, after another silence, she murmured something about my being "a queer fellow." "And I daresay that's why I love you," she added. "But maybe that's why one day I'll come to hate you. — Albert Camus

An endless defeat — Albert Camus

You know that even very intelligent people glory in being able to empty one bottle more than the next man. — Albert Camus

A ridiculous fear pursued me, in fact: one could not die without having confessed all one's lies. Not to God or to one of his representatives; I was above that, as you well imagine. No, it was a matter of confessing to men, to a friend, to a beloved woman, for example. Otherwise, were there but one lie hidden in life, death made it definitive. No one, ever again, would know the truth at this point, since the only one to know it was precisely the dead man sleeping on his secret. The absolute murder of truth used to make me dizzy. — Albert Camus

Since the beginning, on the dry earth of this measureless land scraped to the bone, a few men ceaselessly made their way, possessing nothing but serving no one, the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom. — Albert Camus

After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason. — Albert Camus

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity. — Albert Camus

Murder is terribly exhausting. — Albert Camus

The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions. — Albert Camus

Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing. — Albert Camus

He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe — Albert Camus

But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. — Albert Camus

I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say — Albert Camus

[A writer] cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it. — Albert Camus

I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die. — Albert Camus

Too many bleak years have passed over this little spot of Central Europe, and they've drained all the warmth out of this house. They have killed any desire for friendliness and, let me repeat it, you won't find anything in the least like intimacy here. — Albert Camus

What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians. — Albert Camus

The truth, as the light, makes blind. — Albert Camus

I love life - that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life. — Albert Camus

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears. — Albert Camus

Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema. — Albert Camus

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves. — Albert Camus

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. — Albert Camus

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything. — Albert Camus

Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'. — Albert Camus

A religion that executes its obsolete sovereign must now establish the power of its new sovereign; it
closes the churches, and this leads to an endeavor to build a temple. The blood of the gods, which for a
second bespatters the confessor of Louis XVI, announces a new baptism. Joseph de Maistre qualified the
Revolution as satanic. We can see why and in what sense. Michelet, however, was closer to the truth
when he called it a purgatory. An era blindly embarks down this tunnel on an attempt to discover a new
illumination, a new happiness, and the face of the real God. But what will this new god be? — Albert Camus

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. — Albert Camus

At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare. — Albert Camus

Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched - just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance - so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned. — Albert Camus

We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them. — Albert Camus

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst. — Albert Camus

February 13, 1936
I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps ...
Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself. — Albert Camus

This is the century of fear. — Albert Camus

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade. — Albert Camus

Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are. — Albert Camus

Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought which transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, linked with an irresistible charm. — Albert Camus

To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing. — Albert Camus

I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice. — Albert Camus

As if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent. — Albert Camus

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man! — Albert Camus

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it. — Albert Camus

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. — Albert Camus

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. — Albert Camus

I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate. — Albert Camus

Do you believe in God, doctor?
No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original. — Albert Camus

He was one
of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good
feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a
capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to. — Albert Camus

He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. — Albert Camus

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. — Albert Camus

There is only one class of men, the privileged class — Albert Camus

You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world - in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests. — Albert Camus

They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality. — Albert Camus

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die. — Albert Camus

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much? — Albert Camus

I know simply that the sky will last longer than I. — Albert Camus

When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardour and that illumination. — Albert Camus

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God. — Albert Camus

You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. — Albert Camus

It is better to burn than to disappear. — Albert Camus

Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said. — Albert Camus

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. — Albert Camus

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. — Albert Camus

There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence. — Albert Camus

One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself. — Albert Camus

From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother's love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to "choose" not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. — Albert Camus

We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges. — Albert Camus

The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all. — Albert Camus

But memory is less disposed to compromise — Albert Camus

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation. — Albert Camus

My life was lucky so that I met, I loved (and disappointed) only outstanding people. — Albert Camus

But we have not yet reached that point. For the moment, Ivan offers us only the tortured face of the rebel
plunged in the abyss, incapable of action, torn between the idea of his own innocence and the desire to
kill. He hates the death penalty because it is the image of the human condition, and, at the same time, he
is drawn to crime. Because he has taken the side of mankind, solitude is his lot. With him the rebellion of
reason culminates in madness. — Albert Camus

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. — Albert Camus

When millions of people are starving, everyone is implicated. — Albert Camus

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about. — Albert Camus

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

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage. — Albert Camus

Man wants to reign supreme through the revolution. But why reign supreme if nothing has any
meaning? Why wish for immortality if the aspect of life is so hideous? There is no method of thought
which is absolutely nihilist except, perhaps, the method that leads to suicide, any more than there is
absolute materialism. — Albert Camus

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist. — Albert Camus

That sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. — Albert Camus

We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot. — Albert Camus

The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us. — Albert Camus

Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate. — Albert Camus

Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition. — Albert Camus

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live. — Albert Camus

Give up the tyranny of female charm. — Albert Camus

The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL. — Albert Camus