Quotes

140+ Famous Albert Camus Quotes & Biography

Published

2 years ago

October 10, 2022

Albert Camus is usually stated as an existentialist writer and initially in his career, Camus build an international readership and reputation from his philosophical essays and novels. Below are some of his famous and philosophical quotes that are very useful to encourage someone.

“Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.” — Albert Camus

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.” — Albert Camus

“Yes, everything is simple. It’s people who complicate things.” — Albert Camus

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.” — Albert Camus

“One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.” — Albert Camus

“Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.” — Albert Camus

“Nothing in the world is worth turning one’s back on what one loves.” — Albert Camus

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.” — Albert Camus

“There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.” — Albert Camus

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.” — Albert Camus

“Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth” — Albert Camus

“The essential thing is not to lose oneself, and not to lose that part of oneself that lies sleeping in the world.” — Albert Camus

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” — Albert Camus

“Whoever gives nothing has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.” — Albert Camus

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” — Albert Camus

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” — Albert Camus

“…the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.” — Albert Camus

“Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” — Albert Camus

“Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.” — Albert Camus

“It takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.” — Albert Camus

“There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.” — Albert Camus

“You do not have to unburden your soul for everyone; it will be enough if you do that for those you love.” — Albert Camus

“The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.” — Albert Camus

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” — Albert Camus

“You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.” — Albert Camus

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” — 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

“If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.” — Albert Camus

“I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.” — 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

“Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.” — Albert Camus

“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.” — Albert Camus

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.” — Albert Camus

“It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.” — 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

“You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.” — Albert Camus

“Life is the sum of your choices.” — Albert Camus

Albert Camus Quotes in the depth of winter

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought together?” This is a practical question. We must get down to it. “I despise intelligence” really means: “I cannot bear my doubts.” — Albert Camus

“Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.” — 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

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.” — Albert Camus
“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.” — Albert Camus

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.” — Albert Camus

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” — Albert Camus

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.” — Albert Camus

“It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.” — 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

“There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.” — Albert Camus

“I’m going to tell you something: thoughts are never honest. Emotions are.” — Albert Camus

“There is no shame in preferring happiness.” — Albert Camus

“I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.” — Albert Camus

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.” — Albert Camus

“To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.” — Albert Camus

“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

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — Albert Camus

“I was very fond of you, but now I’m so, so tired. I’m not happy to go, but one needn’t be happy to make another start.” — Albert Camus

“We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.” — Albert Camus

“The innocent is the person who explains nothing” — Albert Camus

“The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.” — Albert Camus

“The act of love is a confession.” — 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

“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

“I know of only one duty, and that is to love.” — Albert Camus
“We must have one love, one great love in our life, since it gives us an alibi for all the moments when we are filled with despair.” — Albert Camus

“If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.” — 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

“Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory….everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That’s why it’s good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.” — Albert Camus

“You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” — Albert Camus

“I rebel; therefore I exist.” — Albert Camus

“Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.” — Albert Camus

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” — Albert Camus

“That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3” — Albert Camus

“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.” — Albert Camus

“Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” — Albert Camus

“I don’t want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.” — Albert Camus

“Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.” — Albert Camus

“If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves, the stronger the absurd grows.” — Albert Camus

“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.” — Albert Camus

“Integrity needs no rules.” — Albert Camus

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” — Albert Camus

“I am on your side. But you have no way of knowing it, because your heart is blind.” — Albert Camus

“And never have I felt so deeply at one and, at the same time, so detached from myself, and so present in the world.” — Albert Camus

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.” — Albert Camus

“Charm is a way of getting the answer ‘Yes’ without asking a clear question.” — 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

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.” — Albert Camus
“The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.” — Albert Camus
“We all have a weakness for beauty.” — Albert Camus
“Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.” — Albert Camus

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.” — 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

“Liberty is the right not to lie.” — Albert Camus

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” — Albert Camus

“But that’s love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.” — 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
“What is a rebel? A man who says no.” — Albert Camus

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus

the stranger albert camus quotes and page numbers

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus

“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.” — Albert Camus

“But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?” — Albert Camus
“A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon the world.” — Albert Camus

“I love all or I love nothing. Hence it is that I love nothing.” — Albert Camus

“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.” — Albert Camus

“It is better to burn than to disappear.” — Albert Camus

“But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.” — Albert Camus

“Yes, everything is simple. It’s people who complicate things.” — 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
“Words that come from the heart are always simple.” — Albert Camus
“Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it’s meaningless.” — Albert Camus
“Life is a sum of all your choices”. So, what are you doing today?” — Albert Camus
“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.” — Albert Camus
“The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.” — Albert Camus
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” — Albert Camus
“Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.” — Albert Camus
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.” — Albert Camus
“The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.” — 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
“Find your happiness in yourself.” — Albert Camus
“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.” — Albert Camus
“The Four Conditions of Happiness: Life in the open air, Love for another being,Freedom from ambition,Creation” — 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
“Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.” — Albert Camus
“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.” — Albert Camus
“Life should be lived to the point of tears” — Albert Camus
“An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.” — 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
“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
“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.” — Albert Camus
“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.” — Albert Camus
“No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.” — Albert Camus
“Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.” — Albert Camus
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.” — Albert Camus
“Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.” — Albert Camus
“Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.” — 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
“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.” — 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
“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” — Albert Camus
“If the world were clear, art would not exist.” — Albert Camus
“To know oneself, one should assert oneself.” — Albert Camus
“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.” — Albert Camus
“We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.” — Albert Camus
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” — Albert Camus

Table of Contents

Early Life

He was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, France Algeria. Philosopher: He was also a playwright and novelist. His best-known works are L’Étranger (1942), La Peste (1947), La Chute (1956), and La Peste (The Plague). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. His ideas helped to spread the idea of absurdism. In his essay, The Rebel, he said that he spent his whole life fighting against the philosophy of nihilism, but he also learned a lot about individual freedom. People read amazing Albert Camus Quotes to get motivation in their life.

In fact, Camus didn’t think he was an existentialist, even though he was often thought of as one even when he was alive. In a 1945 interview, Camus said he was not an existentialist: “No, I am not.” Sartre and I are always surprised when we see our names linked together. “Camus joined the French Communist Party in early 1935,” he said. He thought it was a good way to fight the “inequalities between Europeans and “natives.” If we think about it this way, we might think of communism as a way to get started and asceticism as a way to get ready for more spiritual activities.

In 1936, the Algerian Communist Party (PCA) was started by people who wanted to be free. Albert Camus joined the activities of the Algerian People’s Party (Le Parti du Peuple Algérien), which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades. They accused him of being a Trotskyist and kicked him out of the party in 1937. Camus then became linked to the anarchist movement in France.

Educational Career

In 1918, Camus started going to school at the local Ecole Communale, where he learned a lot. A lot of people were interested in him right away. One of them was his teacher, Louis Germain. He told him to look for money so he could go to high school. He also convinced his grandmother to let him finish school. At school, Camus was very good at both studies and sports. He was a big fan of football and swimming. This isn’t all. He started to enjoy how intellectually stimulating the school was, and he especially liked reading the works of Gide and Malraux.

A French high school accepted him in 1923, and he went on to study at the University of Algiers. After he got tuberculosis in 1930, he had to stop playing football. He had been a goalkeeper for a well-known Algerian university team before that. Another thing: He didn’t have the time or money to study full-time. To make money, he worked as a private tutor, a clerk for car parts, and a helper at the Meteorological Institute, to name a few jobs.

Playing Career

Junior team: Camus kept goal for the team from 1928 to 1930, when they won the North African Champions Cup and the North African Cup twice each in the 1930s. Camus was a huge fan of the sense of team spirit, fraternity, and common goal. In match reports, Camus was often praised for playing with passion and courage. When he got tuberculosis at the age of 17, he lost all of his football dreams. For a long time, Camus had to stay in bed because of the ailment, which was then incurable.

Career

In 1935, he helped start the Théâtre du Travail (Worker’s Theatre) and began writing plays. This is why he was fired from his job: A report he wrote about peasants in Kabylie got him fired. A socialist paper called Soir-Republica then hired him to write about and review the paper.

Camus was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 because of his work in French literature. He didn’t like Marxism-Leninism, and he didn’t like how it used violence as a way to free people. Camus was a member of groups like Maison de Culture in Algiers in the 1930s that were very left-wing, like that. Camus was a member of the French Resistance during World War II, and he always fought against totalitarianism.

Personal life

In 1913, Albert Camus was born in Dréan, which was then called Mondovi. He was born on November 7, 1913. His mother was from Spain and could only hear with her left ear. His father, Lucien, was a poor farmer from Alsace. Albert lived with his father for only eight months before the start of World War I. Lucien was called up to fight in the Battle of Marne. He was one of the first people to get hurt. His death came on October 11^th, 1914.

He went to the Lycée Bugeaud in 1923, where boys from different backgrounds came to learn. He was at first embarrassed to write his mother’s job as “domestic,” but soon became angry with himself. After that, he was never ashamed of being poor.

After a few months, Camus married Simone Hié on June 16, 1934. She was engaged to Camus’ friend Max-Pol Fouchet at the time. In fact, the marriage didn’t last very long. They broke up in July 1936, and the divorce was over in September 1940. On December 3, 1940, Camus married Francine Faure, a pianist and mathematician who he met in 1937. He married her on December 3, 1940. As much as he loved his wife, he didn’t believe in marriage. He had a lot of extra-marital affairs.

Death

Camus died in a car accident near Sens, in the small town of Villeblevin, on January 4, 1960, when he was 46 years old. Many people thought that the Soviets were behind the accident, but there is no proof of that. Camus was left behind by his wife and two daughters.