Albert Camus quotes
French-Algerian novelist and philosopher of the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus asks how to live well in a universe without inherent meaning.
43 passages across 17 themes. More on Albert Camus.
On meaning
“Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.”
“It's better to bet on this life than on the next.”
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
“Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.”
“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”
“Great novelists are philosopher novelists — that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.”
“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”
“To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.”
“The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.”
“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
On death
“We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.”
“Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.”
“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
“To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.”
On love
“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.”
“The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.”
“He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”
On time
“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”
“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
“Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.”
“What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.”
On joy
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.”
“I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.”
“Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.”
On action
“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”
“I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.”
“I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.”
On truth
“One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.”
“Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.”
“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
On acceptance
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.”
On presence
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
“Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.”
On resilience
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
On beauty
“We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.”
On hope
“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.”
On listening
“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
On fear
“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
On discipline
“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”
On freedom
“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden.”
On authenticity
“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.”