Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”

— Albert Camus

152. “No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.”

— Albert Camus

153. “He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.”

— Albert Camus

154. “The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all – he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.”

— Albert Camus

155. “I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.”

— Albert Camus

156. “The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.”

— Albert Camus

157. “To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.”

— Albert Camus

158. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”

— Albert Camus

159. “There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.”

— Albert Camus

160. “A true masterpiece does not tell everything.”

— Albert Camus

161. “To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.”

— Albert Camus

162. “Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.”

— Albert Camus

163. “If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.”

— Albert Camus

164. “In order to exist, man must rebel.”

— Albert Camus

165. “To know oneself, one should assert oneself.”

— Albert Camus

166. “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”

— Albert Camus

167. “To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.”

— Albert Camus

168. “I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.”

— Albert Camus

169. “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.”

— Albert Camus

170. “Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.”

— Albert Camus

171. “Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.”

— Albert Camus

172. “At the present time, I long only to sleep and to remain silent. I am sick of humanity.”

— Albert Camus

173. “Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”

— Albert Camus

174. “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”

— Albert Camus

175. “A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.”

— Albert Camus

176. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”

— Albert Camus

177. “Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.”

— Albert Camus

178. “When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.”

— Albert Camus

179. “The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.”

— Albert Camus

180. “Suffering gives us no special rights.”

— Albert Camus

181. “It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.”

— Albert Camus

182. “If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.”

— Albert Camus

183. “The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.”

— Albert Camus

184. “Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”

— Albert Camus

185. “Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.”

— Albert Camus

186. “For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.”

— Albert Camus

187. “Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.”

— Albert Camus

188. “When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”

— Albert Camus

189. “An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.”

— Albert Camus

190. “At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.”

— Albert Camus

191. “Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.”

— Albert Camus

192. “Men die and they are not happy.”

— Albert Camus

193. “Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.”

— Albert Camus

194. “Have pity, Lord, on those who love and are separated.”

— Albert Camus

195. “The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.”

— Albert Camus

196. “For 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.”

— Albert Camus

197. “I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored.”

— Albert Camus

198. “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.”

— Albert Camus

199. “At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.”

— Albert Camus

200. “Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.”

— Albert Camus