Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.”

— Albert Camus

202. “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

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

— Albert Camus

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Albert Camus

208. “A fate is not a punishment.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

211. “A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.”

— Albert Camus

212. “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

213. “It’s not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.”

— Albert Camus

214. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

218. “After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

220. “Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”

— Albert Camus

221. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

227. “At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”

— Albert Camus

228. “I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Albert Camus

233. “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

234. “The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.”

— Albert Camus

235. “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

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

— Albert Camus

237. “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

238. “No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren’t worse makes a failure of his or her life.”

— Albert Camus

239. “No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.”

— Albert Camus

240. “The absurd is sin without God.”

— Albert Camus

241. “The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.”

— Albert Camus

242. “I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.”

— Albert Camus

243. “Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”

— Albert Camus

244. “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

245. “Liberty is the right not to lie.”

— Albert Camus

246. “The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.”

— Albert Camus

247. “The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

249. “The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.”

— Albert Camus

250. “Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we’d never be done with it.”

— Albert Camus