Top 80 Albert Camus Quotes

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

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.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.

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.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

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.

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

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

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

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

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.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

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

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.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

We are all special cases.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

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.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

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.

Integrity has no need of rules.

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

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.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

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

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

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

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

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

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

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.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

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.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

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.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood – never.

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.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

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

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.