Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. He is best known for his works of fiction, including The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and The Myth of Sisyphus. His philosophy was centered around the idea of absurdism, which is the belief that life is ultimately meaningless and that humans must find their own meaning despite this. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Albert Camus on love, life, absurdity.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
Albert Camus Quotes About Love
I know of only one duty, and that is to love. — Albert Camus
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage. — Albert Camus
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love. — Albert Camus
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't. — Albert Camus
True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person. — Albert Camus
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
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3 — Albert Camus
Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it. — Albert Camus
If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us. — Albert Camus
Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Life
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. — Albert Camus
You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. — Albert Camus
There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for. — Albert Camus
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman. — Albert Camus
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies. — Albert Camus
I rebel; therefore I exist. — Albert Camus
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. — Albert Camus
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. — Albert Camus
Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Absurdity
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
Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. — Albert Camus
It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.' — Albert Camus
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. — Albert Camus
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. — Albert Camus
I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. — Albert Camus
The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge. — Albert Camus
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful — Albert Camus
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Happiness
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. — Albert Camus
In that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. — 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
One must imagine Sisyphus happy. — Albert Camus
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. — Albert Camus
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. — Albert Camus
Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. — Albert Camus
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. — Albert Camus
It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life. — Albert Camus
It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Freedom
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. — Albert Camus
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. — 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
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely. — Albert Camus
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. — Albert Camus
On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art. — Albert Camus
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty. — Albert Camus
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
The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action. — Albert Camus
Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. — Albert Camus
What is a rebel? A man who says no. — Albert Camus
Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means. — 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
Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified. — Albert Camus
In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary. — 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
Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated. — Albert Camus
It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us. — Albert Camus
Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About War
There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman. — Albert Camus
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
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm. — Albert Camus
To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style. — Albert Camus
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium. — Albert Camus
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals! — Albert Camus
When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. — Albert Camus
Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics. — Albert Camus
Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath. — Albert Camus
The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Friendship
Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life. — Albert Camus
When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace. — 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
Friendship is not so simple. It is hard to get and takes a long time, but when one ha it one cannot get rid of it, one has to face it. — Albert Camus
May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!! — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Beauty
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
After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent. — Albert Camus
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. — Albert Camus
There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between. — Albert Camus
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offers us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. — Albert Camus
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object. — Albert Camus
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
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. — Albert Camus
We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink. — Albert Camus
We all have a weakness for beauty. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Peace
Peace is the only battle worth waging. — Albert Camus
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed. — Albert Camus
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all -- he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly. — Albert Camus
After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace. "Yes, he replied. "The path of sympathy. — Albert Camus
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Existential
There is scarcely any passion without struggle. — Albert Camus
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. — Albert Camus
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. — Albert Camus
For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men. — Albert Camus
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. — Albert Camus
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. — Albert Camus
Everything is true, and nothing is true! — Albert Camus
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
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules — Albert Camus
People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About World
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
If the world were clear, art would not exist. — Albert Camus
I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis. — Albert Camus
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion. — Albert Camus
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. — Albert Camus
This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world. — 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 absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it. — Albert Camus
To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About People
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. — Albert Camus
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves. — Albert Camus
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep. — Albert Camus
If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent. — 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
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants. — Albert Camus
Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are. — Albert Camus
…there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency. — Albert Camus
People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning. — Albert Camus
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Quotes About Live
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself. — Albert Camus
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
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. — Albert Camus
No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life. — Albert Camus
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are. — Albert Camus
Live to the point of tears. — Albert Camus
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. — Albert Camus
It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about. — 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
We have to live and let live in order to create what we are. — Albert Camus
Albert Camus Famous Quotes And Sayings
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others. — Albert Camus
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth. — Albert Camus
Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. — Albert Camus
Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? — Albert Camus
I know of only one duty, and that is to love. — Albert Camus
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. — Albert Camus
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. — Albert Camus
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind. — Albert Camus
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. — Albert Camus
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. — Albert Camus
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. — Albert Camus
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders. — Albert Camus
You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself. — Albert Camus
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken. — Albert Camus
To know oneself, one should assert oneself. — Albert Camus
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. — 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
There is scarcely any passion without struggle. — 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
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman. — Albert Camus
There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man. — Albert Camus
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. — Albert Camus
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. — Albert Camus
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement. — Albert Camus
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. — Albert Camus
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. — Albert Camus
Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority. — 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
All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true. — Albert Camus
The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx. — Albert Camus
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way. — Albert Camus
Where there is no hope, we must invent it. — Albert Camus
When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak. — Albert Camus
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
Integrity has no need of rules. — Albert Camus
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine. — Albert Camus
Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly. — Albert Camus
But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. — Albert Camus
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. — Albert Camus
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. — Albert Camus
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. — Albert Camus
Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing. — Albert Camus
I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards. — Albert Camus
I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this? — Albert Camus
Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate. — Albert Camus
The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another. — 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
The innocent is the person who explains nothing. — Albert Camus
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. — Albert Camus
The act of love is a confession. — Albert Camus
The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not. — Albert Camus
Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. — Albert Camus
Life Lessons by Albert Camus
Albert Camus encourages us to embrace life and all of its struggles, and to find meaning and joy in the simple moments.
He encourages us to take responsibility for our actions, and to accept the consequences of our choices.
He also advocates for a life of authenticity, emphasizing the importance of being true to ourselves and our beliefs.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes by Albert Camus. For popular citation styles (APA, Chicago, MLA), go to citation page.
