Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”

— Albert Camus

202. “You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”

— Albert Camus

203. “There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”

— Albert Camus

204. “Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.”

— Albert Camus

205. “Marry yourself first – promise never to leave you!”

— Albert Camus

206. “The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.”

— Albert Camus

207. “Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.”

— Albert Camus

208. “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.”

— Albert Camus

209. “Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

211. “Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.”

— Albert Camus

212. “Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.”

— Albert Camus

213. “The absurd is sin without God.”

— Albert Camus

214. “Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

216. “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”

— Albert Camus

217. “Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.”

— Albert Camus

218. “The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.”

— Albert Camus

219. “A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.”

— Albert Camus

220. “A loveless world is a dead world.”

— Albert Camus

221. “Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.”

— Albert Camus

222. “I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.”

— Albert Camus

223. “A fate is not a punishment.”

— Albert Camus

224. “Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.”

— Albert Camus

225. “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”

— Albert Camus

226. “Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.”

— Albert Camus

227. “There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.”

— Albert Camus

228. “Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”

— Albert Camus

229. “We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.”

— Albert Camus

230. “I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.”

— Albert Camus

231. “Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.”

— Albert Camus

232. “Marxism is not scientific: at the best, it has scientific prejudices.”

— Albert Camus

233. “The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”

— Albert Camus

234. “On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.”

— Albert Camus

235. “Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.”

— Albert Camus

236. “If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.”

— Albert Camus

237. “I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?”

— Albert Camus

238. “I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.”

— Albert Camus

239. “As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.”

— Albert Camus

240. “I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”

— Albert Camus

241. “There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.”

— Albert Camus

242. “If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.”

— Albert Camus

243. “If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”

— Albert Camus

244. “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”

— Albert Camus

245. “I would like to be able to breathe – to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.”

— Albert Camus

246. “I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.”

— Albert Camus

247. “Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.”

— Albert Camus

248. “I don’t want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.”

— Albert Camus

249. “Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.”

— Albert Camus

250. “To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.”

— Albert Camus