Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.”

— Albert Camus

452. “I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.”

— Albert Camus

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

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

— Albert Camus

457. “The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.”

— Albert Camus

458. “This is the century of fear.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

460. “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

461. “The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.”

— Albert Camus

462. “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

463. “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.”

— Albert Camus

464. “The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

466. “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

467. “Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.”

— Albert Camus

468. “I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

471. “If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.”

— Albert Camus

472. “I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.”

— Albert Camus

473. “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

474. “In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

478. “Fate is not in man but around him.”

— Albert Camus

479. “Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

482. “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

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

— Albert Camus

484. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

490. “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

491. “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

492. “He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!”

— Albert Camus

493. “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

494. “The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art.”

— Albert Camus

495. “On ne comprend pas le destin et c’est pourquoi je me suis fait destin.”

— Albert Camus

496. “That’s why I like you so much. Your heart isn’t dead.”

— Albert Camus

497. “I’ll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”

— Albert Camus

498. “T HERE is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”

— Albert Camus

499. “In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.”

— Albert Camus

500. “And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.”

— Albert Camus