Albert Camus Quotes
Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, the second-youngest recipient in history. Camus was born 7th November 1913, in Algeria to French Pieds Noirs parents. He died 4th January 1960, in Villeblevin, France. His citizenship was French.
Albert Camus is widely known for promoting the concept of “absurdism” — the human conflict between seeking value and meaning in life and our inability to actually find them.
In this article, you will find over 75 quotes and sayings from the French philosopher Albert Camus.
80 Albert Camus Quotes And Sayings
“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
“If time frightens us, this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterwards.”
“Time will prolong time, and life will serve life.”
“Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.”
“One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.”
“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
“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.”
“What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.”
“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
“Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.”
“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”
“Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.”
“A loveless world is a dead world.”
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
“Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.”
“You always get exaggerated notions about things you don’t know anything about.”
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
“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.”
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
“The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.”
“Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”
“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.”
“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.”
“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”
“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”
“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
“For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering.”
“Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.”
“Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest thing in the world.”
“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
“Having money is a way of being free of money.”
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”
“If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.”
“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”
“The absurd hero’s refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.”
“There is no frontier between being and appearing.”
“I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.”
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
“The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.”
“Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.”
“You can’t create experience, you undergo it.”
“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory…Everything is forgotten, even great love.”
“Good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”
“The absurd hero’s refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.”
“I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.”
“We only know of one duty, and that is to love.”
“Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.”
“There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.”
“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.”
“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
“Integrity has no need of rules.”
“We rarely confide in those who are better than we. 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 and 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.”
“What is a rebel? A man who says no.”
“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.”
“We are all special cases.”
“Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.”
“There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.”
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
“Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
“An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.”
“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”
“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
“If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.”
“There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.”
“A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.”
“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”
“It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.”
“And then came human beings; humans wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.”
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”