Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.”

— Albert Camus

452. “The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.”

— Albert Camus

453. “I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn’t even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there’s no idea to which one doesn’t get acclimatized in time.”

— Albert Camus

454. “Happiness is not everything and men have their duties. Mine is to find my mother, a homeland.”

— Albert Camus

455. “It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words, to silence.”

— Albert Camus

456. “The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.”

— Albert Camus

457. “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.”

— Albert Camus

458. “What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.”

— Albert Camus

459. “The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.”

— Albert Camus

460. “By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.”

— Albert Camus

461. “All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.”

— Albert Camus

462. “It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”

— Albert Camus

463. “For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.”

— Albert Camus

464. “To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.”

— Albert Camus

465. “The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”

— Albert Camus

466. “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.”

— Albert Camus

467. “Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.”

— Albert Camus

468. “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.”

— Albert Camus

469. “In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.”

— Albert Camus

470. “I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

— Albert Camus

471. “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.”

— Albert Camus

472. “If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

474. “And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.”

— Albert Camus

475. “One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.”

— Albert Camus

476. “Still, obviously, one can’t be sensible all the time.”

— Albert Camus

477. “Yes, I’m happy, in human terms.”

— Albert Camus

478. “Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.”

— Albert Camus

479. “We are not so mad as to think that we shall create a world in which murder will not occur. We are fighting for a world in which murder will no longer be legal.”

— Albert Camus

480. “It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.”

— Albert Camus

481. “A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It’s a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.”

— Albert Camus

482. “Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.”

— Albert Camus

483. “God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.”

— Albert Camus

484. “To lose one’s life is no great matter; when the time comes I’ll have the courage to lose mine. But what’s intolerable is to see one’s life being drained of meaning, to be told there’s no reason for existing. A man can’t live without some reason for living.”

— Albert Camus

485. “My dear friend, we mustn’t give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.”

— Albert Camus

486. “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”

— Albert Camus

487. “Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”

— Albert Camus

488. “There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.”

— Albert Camus

489. “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.”

— Albert Camus

490. “True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.”

— Albert Camus

491. “What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.”

— Albert Camus

492. “There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.”

— Albert Camus

493. “There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.”

— Albert Camus

494. “Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”

— Albert Camus

495. “Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.”

— Albert Camus

496. “Although “The Myth of Sisyphus” poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

498. “Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.”

— Albert Camus

499. “To state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

— Albert Camus

500. “To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.”

— Albert Camus