Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Albert Camus

352. “You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.”

— Albert Camus

353. “These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

355. “It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.”

— Albert Camus

356. “Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.”

— Albert Camus

357. “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

358. “Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

360. “The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.”

— Albert Camus

361. “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

362. “A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.”

— Albert Camus

363. “Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.”

— Albert Camus

364. “The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

367. “Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.”

— Albert Camus

368. “Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.”

— Albert Camus

369. “I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.”

— Albert Camus

370. “The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.”

— Albert Camus

371. “It is not true that the heart wears out – but the body creates this illusion.”

— Albert Camus

372. “The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.”

— Albert Camus

373. “In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.”

— Albert Camus

374. “In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.”

— Albert Camus

375. “Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.”

— Albert Camus

376. “Those who write clearly have readers.”

— Albert Camus

377. “In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.”

— Albert Camus

378. “It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.”

— Albert Camus

379. “The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.”

— Albert Camus

380. “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

381. “The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.”

— Albert Camus

382. “The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one’s head against a wall.”

— Albert Camus

383. “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

384. “They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.”

— Albert Camus

385. “A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

— Albert Camus

386. “Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.”

— Albert Camus

387. “Art and revolt will die only with the last man.”

— Albert Camus

388. “I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

390. “The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.”

— Albert Camus

391. “Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.”

— Albert Camus

392. “My great idea is that we must forgive the Pope. First of all, he needs it more than anyone else. Besides, it is the only way of placing oneself above him.”

— Albert Camus

393. “In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.”

— Albert Camus

394. “Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.”

— Albert Camus

395. “Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.”

— Albert Camus

396. “Without work all life goes rotten.”

— Albert Camus

397. “In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.”

— Albert Camus

398. “We don’t have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

400. “I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.”

— Albert Camus