Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.”

— Albert Camus

402. “No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.”

— Albert Camus

403. “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: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed. The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing there seized me by the throat, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get back to my cell and sleep.”

— Albert Camus

404. “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”

— Albert Camus

405. “To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

407. “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

— Albert Camus

408. “I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.”

— Albert Camus

409. “The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.”

— Albert Camus

410. “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

411. “Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called “the act of love,” or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

413. “We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.”

— Albert Camus

414. “What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.”

— Albert Camus

415. “I’d have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.”

— Albert Camus

416. “I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.”

— Albert Camus

417. “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

418. “Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.”

— Albert Camus

419. “He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.”

— Albert Camus

420. “I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn’t even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there’s no idea to which one doesn’t get acclimatized in time.”

— Albert Camus

421. “It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words, to silence.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

423. “Happiness is not everything and men have their duties. Mine is to find my mother, a homeland.”

— Albert Camus

424. “The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.”

— Albert Camus

425. “But it’s not easy. I’ve been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn’t need words to make ourselves understood. But people don’t love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn’t.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

427. “By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.”

— Albert Camus

428. “It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”

— Albert Camus

429. “The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

431. “To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.”

— Albert Camus

432. “All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

434. “A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.”

— Albert Camus

435. “For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.”

— Albert Camus

436. “Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death – and I refuse suicide.”

— Albert Camus

437. “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

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

— Albert Camus

439. “Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.”

— Albert Camus

440. “To create is to live twice.”

— Albert Camus

441. “I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

— Albert Camus

442. “Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Albert Camus

447. “In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

449. “People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe – they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.”

— Albert Camus

450. “If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”

— Albert Camus