In this post, we’ll explore Albert Camus quotes, a French philosopher, author, and journalist, famous for his contributions to existentialism and absurdism.
Albert Camus was born in French Algeria in 1913 and grew up in poverty after losing his father in World War I. Despite financial struggles, he excelled academically and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. His early experiences of hardship and injustice deeply influenced his writing and philosophical outlook.
Camus’s most famous works include The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and The Plague (1947). Through these works, he explored themes of absurdity, the human condition, and the search for meaning in an indifferent universe.
His quote:
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
got famous because it perfectly captures his writings of absurdism and indifference.
Let’s read some of the best Albert Camus quotes on life, absurdity, and freedom.
Famous Albert Camus Quotes
1. “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
2. “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
3. “t may be than humanity has but one chance in a thousand of survival; but I would not be human if I did not struggle for that one chance.”
4. “Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”
5. “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
6. “Peace is the only battle worth waging.”
7. “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”
8. “When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”
9. “People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”
10. “I don’t want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.”
11. “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
Best Albert Camus Quotes
1. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
2. “One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know.”
3. “A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.”
4. “I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
5. “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
6. “Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.”
7. “Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”
8. “The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.”
9. “The need to be right – the sign of a vulgar mind.”
10. “Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.”
11. “Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
12. “You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
13. “We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Friendship
1. “Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead. Walk beside me… just be my friend.”
2. “How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.”
3. “Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.”
4. “Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there’s no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Absurdity
1. “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
2. “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
3. “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”
4. “Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.”
5. “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.”
6. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Life
1. “Nothing in life is worth turning your back on, if you love it.”
2. “I love life – that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.”
3. “Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.”
4. “There is no love of life without despair about life.”
5. “Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”
6. “It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.”
7. “Life is a sum of all your choices. So, what are you doing today?”
8. “I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so?”
9. “I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.”
10. “Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter.”
11. “When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Love
1. “Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?”
2. “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.”
3. “They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”
4. “I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.”
5. “After another moment’s silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.”
6. “It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.”
7. “We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”
8. “I know of only one duty, and that is to love.”
9. “To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.”
10. “Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one’s work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”
11. “I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.”
12. “She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Rebellion
1. “I rebel; therefore I exist.”
2. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
3. “Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
4. “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
5. “What is a rebel? A man who says no.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Freedom
1. “Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
2. “I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.”
3. “Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.”
4. “Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Existentialism
1. “The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
2. “After awhile you could get used to anything.”
3. “This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”
4. “If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance. Existentialism ”
5. “Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?” “Yes,” I said.”
6. “The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.”
7. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”
8. “I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored.”
9. “Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
10. “Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.”
11. “I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Happiness
1. “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”
2. “It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.”
3. “To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”
4. “Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.”
5. “Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
6. “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
7. “When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. ”
8. “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.”
9. “Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.”
10. “Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.”
11. “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
12. “An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought together?” This is a practical question. We must get down to it. “I despise intelligence” really means: “I cannot bear my doubts.”
13. “I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude”.
Albert Camus Quotes on Truth
1. “Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.”
2. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
3. “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
4. “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
5. “Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
6. “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
7. “Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
Albert Camus Quotes on Death
1. “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
2. “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.”
3. “Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.”
4. “Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.”
5. “Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”
6. “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”
Philosophical Albert Camus Quotes
1. “Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”
2. “Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.”
3. “At one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”
4. “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.”
5. “A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.”
6. “Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.”
7. “Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.”
8. “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”
9. “There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.”
10. “Integrity has no need of rules.”
11. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
12. “The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
Short Albert Camus Quotes
1. “Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
2. “Live to the point of tears.”
3. “If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
4. “Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”
5. “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
6. “And never have I felt so deeply”
7. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
8. “I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.”
9. “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
10. “You can’t create experience, you undergo it.”
11. “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
12. “There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”
13. “It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”
These Albert Camus quotes perfectly reflect his clarity of thought and powerful storytelling. His philosophy emphasized living authentically and embracing life despite its inherent contradictions.
In 1957, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for enlightening “the human conscience in our time.”
Which of these Albert Camus quotes is your favorite?
Also Read:
