Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”

— Albert Camus

52. “The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.”

— Albert Camus

53. “And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”

— Albert Camus

54. “A work of art is a confession.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

56. “Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.”

— Albert Camus

57. “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”

— Albert Camus

58. “Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.”

— Albert Camus

59. “You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

61. “There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.”

— Albert Camus

62. “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”

— Albert Camus

63. “The absurd hero’s refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.”

— Albert Camus

64. “Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.”

— Albert Camus

65. “For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.”

— Albert Camus

66. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”

— Albert Camus

67. “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.”

— Albert Camus

68. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

70. “You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.”

— Albert Camus

71. “A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.”

— Albert Camus

72. “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

— Albert Camus

73. “Betrayal answers betrayal, the mask of love is answered by the disappearance of love.”

— Albert Camus

74. “Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.”

— Albert Camus

75. “Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.”

— Albert Camus

76. “The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.”

— Albert Camus

77. “I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.”

— Albert Camus

78. “There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.”

— Albert Camus

79. “Life can be magnificent and overwhelming – that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.”

— Albert Camus

80. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.”

— Albert Camus

81. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”

— Albert Camus

82. “There is no love of life without despair of life.”

— Albert Camus

83. “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

— Albert Camus

84. “Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

86. “Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.”

— Albert Camus

87. “All I know of morality I learned from football.”

— Albert Camus

88. “The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.”

— Albert Camus

89. “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.”

— Albert Camus

90. “The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.”

— Albert Camus

91. “The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.”

— Albert Camus

92. “Travel breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Stripped of our props, deprived of our masks, we are completely on the surface of ourselves.”

— Albert Camus

93. “This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”

— Albert Camus

94. “What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.”

— Albert Camus

95. “Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.”

— Albert Camus

96. “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

— Albert Camus

97. “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.”

— Albert Camus

98. “So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.”

— Albert Camus

99. “With rebellion, awareness is born.”

— Albert Camus

100. “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.”

— Albert Camus