Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.”

— Albert Camus

302. “I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.”

— Albert Camus

303. “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.”

— Albert Camus

304. “Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.”

— Albert Camus

305. “The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.”

— Albert Camus

306. “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

308. “We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.”

— Albert Camus

309. “When the body is sad, the heart languishes.”

— Albert Camus

310. “The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”

— Albert Camus

311. “To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.”

— Albert Camus

312. “God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.”

— Albert Camus

313. “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.”

— Albert Camus

314. “Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.”

— Albert Camus

315. “A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.”

— Albert Camus

316. “To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.”

— Albert Camus

317. “I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.”

— Albert Camus

318. “Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.”

— Albert Camus

319. “Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.”

— Albert Camus

320. “You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don’t like the sentence.”

— Albert Camus

321. “Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.”

— Albert Camus

322. “Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.”

— Albert Camus

323. “Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose a future...”

— Albert Camus

324. “If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.”

— Albert Camus

325. “Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will’s impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.”

— Albert Camus

326. “Some are created to love, while the others – to live.”

— Albert Camus

327. “Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.”

— Albert Camus

328. “Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.”

— Albert Camus

329. “Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.”

— Albert Camus

330. “Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.”

— Albert Camus

331. “Without work all life goes rotten.”

— Albert Camus

332. “O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible. – Pindar, Pythian iii.”

— Albert Camus

333. “I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.”

— Albert Camus

334. “No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.”

— Albert Camus

335. “More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.”

— Albert Camus

336. “It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland when we are about to lose it.”

— Albert Camus

337. “In our society, any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.”

— Albert Camus

338. “To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.”

— Albert Camus

339. “And then came human beings; humans wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.”

— Albert Camus

340. “Humans are creatures, who spent their lifes trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd.”

— Albert Camus

341. “Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.”

— Albert Camus

342. “A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”

— Albert Camus

343. “A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.”

— Albert Camus

344. “Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.”

— Albert Camus

345. “I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”

— Albert Camus

346. “Knowing we all gonna die makes life a joke.”

— Albert Camus

347. “In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.”

— Albert Camus

348. “But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.”

— Albert Camus

349. “There are more things to admire in men then to despise.”

— Albert Camus

350. “All healthy men have thought of their own suicide.”

— Albert Camus