Quotes by Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French philosopher, journalist, and author. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, which made him the second youngest recipient in history.
Below are some of his popular quotes
“Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger
“I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep”
― Albert Camus
“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été
“It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”
― Albert Camus
“To create is to live twice.”
― Albert Camus
“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”
― Albert Camus
“I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats 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.”
― Albert Camus
“My soul’s a burden to me, I’ve had enough of it. I’m eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don’t belong here.”
― Albert Camus
“How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
“We don’t have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.”
― Albert Camus
“It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning”
― Albert Camus
“It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”
― Albert Camus
“And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”
― Albert Camus
“Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.”
― Albert Camus
“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.” – Grant”
― Albert Camus, The Plague
“Ah ! cher ami, que les hommes sont pauvres en invention. Ils croient toujours qu’on se suicide pour une raison. Mais on peut très bien se suicider pour deux raisons. Non, ça ne leur entre pas dans la tête. Alors, à quoi bon mourir volontairement, se sacrifier à l’idée qu’on veut donner de soi ? Vous mort, ils en profiteront pour donner à votre geste des motifs idiots, ou vulgaires. Les martyrs, cher ami, doivent choisir d’être oubliés, raillés ou utilisés. Quant à être compris, jamais.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall
“I was at ease in everything, to be sure, but at the same time satisfied with nothing. Each joy made me desire another. I went from festivity to festivity. On occasion I danced for nights on end, ever madder about people and life. At times, late on those nights when the dancing, the slight intoxication, my wild enthusiasm, everyone’s violent unrestraint would fill me with a tired and overwhelmed rapture, it would seem to me—at the breaking point of fatigue and for a second’s flash—that at last I understood the secret; I would rush forth anew. I ran on like that, always heaped with favors, never satiated, without knowing where to stop, until the day — until the evening rather when the music stopped and the lights went out.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall
“It would take patience to wait for the Last Judgement. But that’s it, we’re in a hurry.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall
“I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger
“There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger
“The futility of what was happening here seemed to take me by the throat, I felt like vomiting, and I had only one idea: to get it over, to go back to my cell, and sleep… and sleep.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger
“What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discovered after all the others.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall
“In order to reveal to all eyes what he was made of, I wanted to break open the handsome wax-figure I presented everywhere.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall
“You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people – which means there is no way out.
Happy and judged or absolved and miserable.”
― Albert Camus
“Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep-bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours’ sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across the thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague
The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
“I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one “knew.” This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
“Despite men’s suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of men isolated with their fate.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“friendship is a knowledge acquired by free men. And there is no freedom without intelligence or without mutual understanding.”
― Albert Camus
“We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means which cannot be excused.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“The hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments; our comrades will be more patient than the executioners and more numerous than the bullets.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“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, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“Words always take on the color of the deeds or sacrifices they evoke.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history…Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“For their heroism was that they had to conquer themselves first.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“The people are under arms tonight because they hope for justice for tomorrow, Some go about saying that it is not worthwhile…But this is because they vaguely sense that this insurrection threatens many things thar would continue to stand if all took place otherwise.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“…A city deprived of everything, devoid of light and devoid of heat, starved, and still not crushed.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“Yes, their reasons are overwhelming. They are as big as hope and as deep as revolt. They are the reasons of the future for a country that others tried so long to limit to the gloomy rumination of her past.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“No one can hope that men who have fought in silence for four years and are now fighting all day long in the din of bombs and the crackle of guns will agree to the return of the forces of surrender and injustice under any circumstances. No one can expect that these men will again accept doing what the best and purest did for twenty-five years—that is, loving their country and silently despising her leaders,”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“Our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: ‘This is the way I think. What are your objections?’ We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué: ‘This is the truth, we say. You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall
“The loves we share with a city are often secret loves.”
― Albert Camus, Summer in Algiers
“For years I’ve wanted to live according to everyone else’s morals. I’ve forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth–after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
“He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence— they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveler vainly seeking to slake his thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture that erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death
“In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death
“It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951
“There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel
“And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951
“They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.”
― Albert Camus, The Adulterous Woman
“It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule— of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis,
negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my
light.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.”
― Albert Camus, The Fastidious Assassins
“I noticed that he laid stress on my “intelligence.” It puzzled me rather why what would count as a good point in an ordinary person should be used against an accused man as an overwhelming proof of his guilt.”
― Albert Camus
“In the early days, when they thought this epidemic was much like other epidemics, religion held its ground. But once these people realized their instant peril, they gave their thoughts to pleasure. And all the hideous fears that stamp their faces in the daytime are transformed in the fiery, dusty nightfall into a sort of hectic exaltation, an unkempt freedom fevering in their blood.”
― Albert Camus
Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn’t feel it.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
“It’s only artists who know how to use their
eyes”
― Albert Camus
