Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French-Algerian philosopher, author, and journalist. He is best known for his philosophical and literary works, which often explored the themes of existentialism, absurdism, and the human condition.
Camus was born in Mondovi, French Algeria (now Dréan, Algeria) on November 7, 1913. He grew up in a poor working-class neighborhood and had a challenging childhood, marked by the loss of his father during World War I.
In his early years, Camus was involved in theater and literature. He moved to Paris in the 1930s and became associated with the intellectual and literary circles of the time. He contributed to various magazines and newspapers and gained recognition for his writings.
Camus’ most famous works include:
“The Stranger” (“L’Étranger”) – A novel published in 1942, which tells the story of Meursault, an emotionally detached and apathetic man who becomes involved in a senseless act of violence. The novel explores themes of alienation, absurdity, and the indifference of the universe.
“The Myth of Sisyphus” (“Le Mythe de Sisyphe”) – A philosophical essay published in 1942, in which Camus discusses the concept of the absurd and the idea that life is devoid of inherent meaning. He famously states, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”
“The Plague” (“La Peste”) – A novel published in 1947, depicts a fictional Algerian town struck by a deadly plague outbreak. The novel examines the human response to suffering and the moral responsibilities of individuals in the face of an epidemic.
“The Fall” (“La Chute”) – A novel published in 1956, where the protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, narrates his moral and psychological decline, offering insights into human hypocrisy and guilt.
Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 for his contribution to literature, philosophy, and the arts. Throughout his life, he remained politically engaged and voiced his opposition to totalitarianism and injustice. He was critical of both communism and colonialism.
Tragically, Camus died in a car accident on January 4, 1960, at the age of 46. Despite his untimely death, his works and philosophical ideas continue to influence and inspire readers and thinkers around the world.
Albert Camus Quotes
1. “In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”
— Albert Camus
2. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
— Albert Camus
3. “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
— Albert Camus
4. “Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.”
— Albert Camus
5. “Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
— Albert Camus
6. “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
7. “I know of only one duty, and that is to love.”
— Albert Camus
8. “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
— Albert Camus
9. “Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.”
— Albert Camus
10. “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.”
— Albert Camus
11. “The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.”
— Albert Camus
12. “You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”
— Albert Camus
13. “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.”
— Albert Camus
14. “The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.”
— Albert Camus
15. “The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
— Albert Camus
16. “There is no love of life without despair of life.”
— Albert Camus
17. “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.”
— Albert Camus
18. “The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.”
— Albert Camus
19. “Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.”
— Albert Camus
20. “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
— Albert Camus
21. “A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”
— Albert Camus
22. “Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?”
— Albert Camus
23. “There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.”
— Albert Camus
24. “We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”
— Albert Camus
25. “He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.”
— Albert Camus
26. “Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”
— Albert Camus
27. “We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.”
— Albert Camus
28. “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”
— Albert Camus
29. “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.”
— Albert Camus
30. “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
— Albert Camus
31. “A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.”
— Albert Camus
32. “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
— Albert Camus
33. “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
— Albert Camus
34. “Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”
— Albert Camus
35. “To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.”
— Albert Camus
36. “Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
— Albert Camus
37. “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
— Albert Camus
38. “The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.”
— Albert Camus
39. “Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.”
— Albert Camus
40. “Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.”
— Albert Camus
41. “Integrity has no need of rules.”
— Albert Camus
42. “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
— Albert Camus
43. “Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.”
— Albert Camus
44. “An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
— Albert Camus
45. “It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.”
— Albert Camus
46. “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”
— Albert Camus
47. “It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”
— Albert Camus
48. “To know oneself, one should assert oneself.”
— Albert Camus
49. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”
— Albert Camus
50. “Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”
— Albert Camus
51. “Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.”
— Albert Camus
52. “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
— Albert Camus
53. “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
— Albert Camus
54. “Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”
— Albert Camus
55. “It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.”
— Albert Camus
56. “Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.”
— Albert Camus
57. “Charm is a way of getting the answer ‘Yes’ without asking a clear question.”
— Albert Camus
58. “Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
— Albert Camus
59. “The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
— Albert Camus
60. “For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
— Albert Camus
61. “No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.”
— Albert Camus
62. “To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.”
— Albert Camus
63. “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
64. “Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”
— Albert Camus
65. “We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.”
— Albert Camus
66. “Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.”
— Albert Camus
67. “A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.”
— Albert Camus
68. “Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.”
— Albert Camus
69. “Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.”
— Albert Camus
70. “Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.”
— Albert Camus
71. “To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.”
— Albert Camus
72. “Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.”
— Albert Camus
73. “It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.”
— Albert Camus
74. “Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.”
— Albert Camus
75. “How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!”
— Albert Camus
76. “Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.”
— Albert Camus
77. “The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.”
— Albert Camus
78. “Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.”
— Albert Camus
79. “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
— Albert Camus
80. “I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.”
— Albert Camus
81. “One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.”
— Albert Camus
82. “In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.”
— Albert Camus
83. “We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.”
— Albert Camus
84. “There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.”
— Albert Camus
85. “Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.”
— Albert Camus
86. “I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.”
— Albert Camus
87. “After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.”
— Albert Camus
88. “Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.”
— Albert Camus
89. “In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.”
— Albert Camus
90. “Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.”
— Albert Camus
91. “Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
— Albert Camus
92. “I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.”
— Albert Camus
93. “Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.”
— Albert Camus
94. “As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.”
— Albert Camus
95. “To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.”
— Albert Camus
96. “We are all special cases.”
— Albert Camus
97. “By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.”
— Albert Camus
98. “To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.”
— Albert Camus
99. “Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”
— Albert Camus
100. “Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.”
— Albert Camus
101. “What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.”
— Albert Camus
102. “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”
— Albert Camus
103. “Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.”
— Albert Camus
104. “We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.”
— Albert Camus
105. “The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.”
— Albert Camus
106. “At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.”
— Albert Camus
107. “Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.”
— Albert Camus
108. “When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.”
— Albert Camus
109. “No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.”
— Albert Camus
110. “Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.”
— Albert Camus
112. “I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.”
— Albert Camus
113. “Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.”
— Albert Camus
114. “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”
— Albert Camus
115. “A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.”
— Albert Camus
116. “Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.”
— Albert Camus
117. “Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.”
— Albert Camus
118. “How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.”
— Albert Camus
119. “Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.”
— Albert Camus
120. “Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.”
— Albert Camus
