Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.”

— Albert Camus

352. “The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.”

— Albert Camus

353. “Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.”

— Albert Camus

354. “When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.”

— Albert Camus

355. “Big tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because of all the wrinkles, they weren’t dripping off. They spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film over his ruined face.”

— Albert Camus

356. “Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.”

— Albert Camus

357. “In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.”

— Albert Camus

358. “She was waiting, but she didn’t know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.”

— Albert Camus

359. “Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yeild nothing on the plane of freedom.”

— Albert Camus

360. “My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.”

— Albert Camus

361. “For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering.”

— Albert Camus

362. “Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.”

— Albert Camus

363. “O light! This the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

— Albert Camus

364. “Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.”

— Albert Camus

365. “The innocent is the person who explains nothing.”

— Albert Camus

366. “There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying.”

— Albert Camus

367. “Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.”

— Albert Camus

368. “It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.”

— Albert Camus

369. “A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”

— Albert Camus

370. “There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.”

— Albert Camus

371. “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

372. “Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.”

— Albert Camus

373. “Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.”

— Albert Camus

374. “The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it.”

— Albert Camus

375. “Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.”

— Albert Camus

376. “There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.”

— Albert Camus

377. “That’s the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love.”

— Albert Camus

378. “Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”

— Albert Camus

379. “No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait.”

— Albert Camus

380. “I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.”

— Albert Camus

381. “The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.”

— Albert Camus

382. “The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.”

— Albert Camus

383. “I’d buy myself a cabin on the beach, I’d put some glue in my navel, and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing.”

— Albert Camus

384. “Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.”

— Albert Camus

385. “There is only one class of men, the privileged class.”

— Albert Camus

386. “Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.”

— Albert Camus

387. “This is the century of fear.”

— Albert Camus

388. “From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.”

— Albert Camus

389. “The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

391. “The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth, but it will be ruled over by men a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Cassars, because they were the first to understand and later, with time, by all men.”

— Albert Camus

392. “Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.”

— Albert Camus

393. “Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.”

— Albert Camus

394. “Finally, and most of all, words failed him.”

— Albert Camus

395. “In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.”

— Albert Camus

396. “Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.”

— Albert Camus

397. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

400. “I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.”

— Albert Camus