-->

Top 100 Albert Camus Quotes

These are the most popular quotations and best examples of quotes by 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

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

... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is dif... ~Albert Camus

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to bet better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse. ~Albert Camus

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

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

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths. ~Albert Camus

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
D'Arrast: 'Just tell me, has your good Jesus always answered your call?' The Rooster: 'Always, no, Captain.'... ~Albert Camus

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way. ~Albert Camus

A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. ~Albert Camus

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means. ~Albert Camus

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. ~Albert Camus

In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. Art. ~Albert Camus

All I want is the moon, Helicon. I know in advance what will kill me. I have not yet exhausted all that can make me live. That is why I want t... ~Albert Camus

Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula. ~Albert Camus

Everyone Tarrou set eyes on had that vacant gaze, and was visibly suffering from the complete break with all that life had meant to him. And s... ~Albert Camus

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

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion. ~Albert Camus

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. ~Albert Camus

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. ~Albert Camus
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves. ~Albert Camus

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing. ~Albert Camus

As usual I finish the day before the sea, sumptuous this evening beneath the moon, which writes Arab symbols with phosphorescent streaks on the slow swells. There is no end to the sky and the waters. How well they accompany sadness!. ~Albert Camus

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question. ~Albert Camus

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world. ~Albert Camus

All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out. ~Albert Camus
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. ~Albert Camus

Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian. ~Albert Camus

What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. ~Albert Camus

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
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. ~Albert Camus

In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon. ~Albert Camus

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

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin. ~Albert Camus

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

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

Great ideas come into the world as quietly as doves. Perhaps then , if we listen attentively we shall hear, among the uproar of empires and nations, the faint fluttering of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. Some will say this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. Each and every one, on the foundations of their own suffering and joy builds for all. ~Albert Camus

You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them. ~Albert Camus

The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date. ~Albert Camus
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting. ~Albert Camus

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route. ~Albert Camus

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. Life. ~Albert Camus

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm. ~Albert Camus

It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature. ~Albert Camus

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God. ~Albert Camus

What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. ~Albert Camus
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. ~Albert Camus

Listen to me, imbecile. If the Treasury is important, then human life is not. This is clear. All those who think like you ought to admit this ... ~Albert Camus

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing. ~Albert Camus

The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case. ~Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears. ~Albert Camus

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

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude. ~Albert Camus

Losing life is a trifle and I will have that courage when I need it. But to see the meaning of this life vanishing, our reason for existing di... ~Albert Camus
I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness. ~Albert Camus

The society based on production is only productive, not creative. ~Albert Camus

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. ~Albert Camus

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back. ~Albert Camus

The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial. ~Albert Camus

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions. ~Albert Camus
I love my country too much to be a nationalist. ~Albert Camus

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ~Albert Camus

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death. ~Albert Camus

I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day. ~Albert Camus

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

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely. ~Albert Camus

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day. ~Albert Camus

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

Men die and they are not happy. ~Albert Camus

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man he fornicated and read the papers. ~Albert Camus

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed. ~Albert Camus
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion. ~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

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

More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure. ~Albert Camus

If there is a sin against life, it consist perhaps not so much in despairing of life as hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. Albert Camus. ~Albert Camus

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. ~Albert Camus

My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: Let us rejoice. Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths. ~Albert Camus

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

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

On certain mornings, as we turn a corner, an exquisite dew falls on our heart and then vanishes. But the freshness lingers, and this, always, is what the heart needs. The earth must have risen in just such a light the morning the world was born. ~Albert Camus
If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given tous fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth. ~Albert Camus

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

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence. ~Albert Camus

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist. ~Albert Camus

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well. ~Albert Camus

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career. ~Albert Camus

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus

To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die. ~Albert Camus
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. ~Albert Camus

In the depth of winter, I learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus

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

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference. ~Albert Camus

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus

We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. ~Albert Camus

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. ~Albert Camus

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus

Click to comment