Top 500 Albert Camus Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Albert Camus

402. “If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.”

— Albert Camus

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.”

— Albert Camus

408. “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

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

— Albert Camus

410. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Albert Camus

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Albert Camus

419. “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

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

— Albert Camus

421. “He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!”

— Albert Camus

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

427. “Rien, rien n’avait d’importance et je savais bien pourquoi.”

— Albert Camus

428. “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

430. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

437. “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

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

— Albert Camus

439. “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

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

— Albert Camus

441. “In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.”

— Albert Camus

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Albert Camus

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

— Albert Camus

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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