Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Albert Camus. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Albert Camus
Albert Camus ( kam-OO, US also kə-MOO; French: [albɛʁ kamy] (listen); 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) 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. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
Camus was born in French Algeria to Pieds Noirs parents. He spent his childhood in a poor neighborhood and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. He was in Paris when the Germans invaded France during World War II in 1940. Camus tried to flee but finally joined the French Resistance where he served as editor-in-chief at Combat, an outlawed newspaper. After the war, he was a celebrity figure and gave many lectures around the world. He married twice but had many extramarital affairs. Camus was politically active; he was part of the left that opposed the Soviet Union because of its totalitarianism. Camus was a moralist and leaned towards anarcho-syndicalism. He was part of many organisations seeking European integration. During the Algerian War (1954–1962), he kept a neutral stance, advocating for a multicultural and pluralistic Algeria, a position that caused controversy and was rejected by most parties.
Philosophically, Camus's views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism, a movement reacting against the rise of nihilism. He is also considered to be an existentialist, even though he firmly rejected the term throughout his lifetime.
I'll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don't wait for the last judgement. It takes place everyday.
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds, a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents.
There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.
The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.
Fortunately there is gin, the sole glimmer in this darkness. Do you feel the golden, copper-coloured light it kindles in you? I like walking through the city of an evening in the warmth of gin.
To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves the stronger the absurd grows.
People don't love each other at our age, Marthe--they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.
It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.
Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.
I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.
You see, I've heard of a man whose friend had been imprisoned and who slept on the floor of his room every night in order not to enjoy a comfort of which his friend had been deprived.
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my
revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of
consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation
to death--and I refuse suicide.
An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions.
Nous sommes devenus lucides. Nous avons remplacé le dialogue par le communiqué.
Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star.... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
But memory is less disposed to compromise.
For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?
Le monde est beau, et hors de lui, point de salut.
We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.
Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.
I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.
Time drips, heavy, slow.
In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
Happiness is not everything and men have their duties. Mine is to find my mother, a homeland.
I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say.
It is immoral not to tell.
We writers must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.
I have come to love in this world what it has mutilated and torn.
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
In the end, man is not entirely guilty -- he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent -- he continues it.
There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
There is something divine in mindless beauty.
In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.
To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.
Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.
It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
Murder is terribly exhausting.
A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.
Honor lay in obedience, which was often confused with crime. Military law punishes disobedience by death, and its honor is servitude. When all the world has become military, then crime consists in not killing if orders insist on it.
Somebody inside of me has always tried, with all his strength, to be nobody.
Our world does not need tepid souls. It needs burning hearts, men who know the proper place of moderation.
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
But now the artist is in the amphitheatre. Of necessity, his voice is not quite the same; it is not nearly so firm.
Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words to silence.
So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.
I've seen of enough of people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.
And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.
No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.
After all, I do not have so many ways of proving that I am free. We is always free at the expense of someone else. It is a bother,but it is normal.
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.
In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
In order to exist, man must rebel.
Longer Version:
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.
Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.
One thinks differently about the same thing in the morning and in the evening. But where is the truth, in the night thought or in the spirit of midday? Two replies, two races of men.