150 Popular Albert Camus Quotes from Famous Novelist

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian philosopher, author and journalist recognized with a Nobel Prize in Literature at 44.

Born in French Algeria, he overcame poverty and studied philosophy at the University of Algiers.

During WWII, he edited the underground newspaper, ‘Combat’. Notable for works like The Stranger and The Plague, Camus was influential in developing the philosophy of absurdism, although he rejected the existentialist label.

Albert Camus

He criticized Stalin’s regime, supported anarcho-syndicalism and European unity, and controversially promoted multiculturalism during the Algerian War.

Related: Osho Quotes and Eric Thomas Quotes.

We have made a list of the best quotes from Albert Camus for you.


Best Albert Camus Quotes (Author of The Stranger)

1. “Life is the sum of your choices.” ~ (Albert Camus).

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2. “Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.” ~ (Albert Camus).

3. “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” ~ (Albert Camus).

4. “I rebel; therefore I exist.” ~ (Albert Camus).

5. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” ~ (Albert Camus).

6. “Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” ~ (Albert Camus).

7. “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” ~ (Albert Camus).

8. “Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” ~ (Albert Camus).

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9. “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” ~ (Albert Camus).

10. “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.” ~ (Albert Camus).

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.” ~ (Albert Camus).

12. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

13. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” ~ (Albert Camus).

Powerful Albert Camus Quotes

14. “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” ~ (Albert Camus).

15. “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~ (Albert Camus).

16. “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” ~ (Albert Camus).

17. “Life should be lived to the point of tears.” ~ (Albert Camus).

18. “Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.” ~ (Albert Camus).

19. “There is scarcely any passion without struggle.” ~ (Albert Camus).

20. “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. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~ (Albert Camus).

21. “Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

22. “Peace is the only battle worth waging.” ~ (Albert Camus).

23. “A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.” ~ (Albert Camus).

24. “Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.” ~ (Albert Camus).

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25. “People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.” ~ (Albert Camus).

26. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” ~ (Albert Camus).

27. “Yes, everything is simple. It’s people who complicate things.” ~ (Albert Camus).

28. “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.” ~ (Albert Camus).

29. “When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.” ~ (Albert Camus).

30. “Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it’s meaningless.” ~ (Albert Camus).

Top Albert Camus Quotes

31. “Find your happiness in yourself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

32. “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.” ~ (Albert Camus).

33. “An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

34. “The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.” ~ (Albert Camus).

35. “Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.” ~ (Albert Camus).

36. “You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.” ~ (Albert Camus).

37. “We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream, and we won’t let this world die without a fight.” ~ (Albert Camus).

38. “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

39. “I know of only one duty, and that is to love.” ~ (Albert Camus).

40. “For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

41. “What is a rebel? A man who says no.” ~ (Albert Camus).

42. “This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.” ~ (Albert Camus).

43. “But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.” ~ (Albert Camus).

44. “There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.” ~ (Albert Camus).

45. “Integrity has no need of rules.” ~ (Albert Camus).

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46. “There is no shame in preferring happiness.” ~ (Albert Camus).

47. “Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.” ~ (Albert Camus).

48. “The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.” ~ (Albert Camus).

49. “The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.” ~ (Albert Camus).

50. “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.” ~ (Albert Camus).

Famous Albert Camus Quotes

51. “One cannot be a part-time nihilist.” ~ (Albert Camus).

52. “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” ~ (Albert Camus).

53. “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” ~ (Albert Camus).

54. “The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.” ~ (Albert Camus).

55. “There are plagues, and there are victims, and it’s the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.” ~ (Albert Camus).

56. “Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.” ~ (Albert Camus).

57. “But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.” ~ (Albert Camus).

58. “The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

59. “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” ~ (Albert Camus).

60. “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.” ~ (Albert Camus).

61. “We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.” ~ (Albert Camus).

62. “After awhile you could get used to anything.” ~ (Albert Camus).

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63. “To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.” ~ (Albert Camus).

64. “The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” ~ (Albert Camus).

65. “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” ~ (Albert Camus).

66. “There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.” ~ (Albert Camus).

67. “For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.” ~ (Albert Camus).

68. “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.” ~ (Albert Camus).

69. “Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.” ~ (Albert Camus).

70. “I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.” ~ (Albert Camus).

Short Albert Camus Quotes

71. “It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.” ~ (Albert Camus).

72. “With rebellion, awareness is born.” ~ (Albert Camus).

73. “There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible.” ~ (Albert Camus).

74. “Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.” ~ (Albert Camus).

75. “In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul.” ~ (Albert Camus).

76. “Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.” ~ (Albert Camus).

77. “If the world were clear, art would not exist.” ~ (Albert Camus).

78. “Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.” ~ (Albert Camus).

79. “Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.” ~ (Albert Camus).

80. “Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.” ~ (Albert Camus).

81. “Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.” ~ (Albert Camus).

82. “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.” ~ (Albert Camus).

83. “I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.” ~ (Albert Camus).

84. “Everybody knows life isn’t worth living.” ~ (Albert Camus).

85. “Having money is a way of being free of money.” ~ (Albert Camus).

86. “A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.” ~ (Albert Camus).

87. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” ~ (Albert Camus).

88. “The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all – he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.” ~ (Albert Camus).

Great Albert Camus Quotes

89. “I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.” ~ (Albert Camus).

90. “If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.” ~ (Albert Camus).

91. “That’s love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.” ~ (Albert Camus).

92. “The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.” ~ (Albert Camus).

93. “A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.” ~ (Albert Camus).

94. “Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” ~ (Albert Camus).

95. “Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.” ~ (Albert Camus).

96. “The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.” ~ (Albert Camus).

97. “To know oneself, one should assert oneself.” ~ (Albert Camus).

98. “In order to exist, man must rebel.” ~ (Albert Camus).

99. “Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.” ~ (Albert Camus).

100. “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” ~ (Albert Camus).

101. “And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.” ~ (Albert Camus).

102. “If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.” ~ (Albert Camus).

103. “Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” ~ (Albert Camus).

104. “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” ~ (Albert Camus).

105. “A work of art is a confession.” ~ (Albert Camus).

106. “You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.” ~ (Albert Camus).

107. “There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.” ~ (Albert Camus).

108. “Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.” ~ (Albert Camus).

109. “Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.” ~ (Albert Camus).

110. “Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.” ~ (Albert Camus).

111. “The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.” ~ (Albert Camus).

112. “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.” ~ (Albert Camus).

113. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” ~ (Albert Camus).

114. “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.” ~ (Albert Camus).

115. “For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.” ~ (Albert Camus).

116. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ~ (Albert Camus).

117. “The absurd hero’s refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.” ~ (Albert Camus).

118. “A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.” ~ (Albert Camus).

119. “You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.” ~ (Albert Camus).

120. “Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.” ~ (Albert Camus).

121. “Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.” ~ (Albert Camus).

122. “The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.” ~ (Albert Camus).

123. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.” ~ (Albert Camus).

124. “There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.” ~ (Albert Camus).

125. “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?” ~ (Albert Camus).

126. “I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.” ~ (Albert Camus).

127. “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.” ~ (Albert Camus).

128. “Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.” ~ (Albert Camus).

129. “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” ~ (Albert Camus).

130. “There is no love of life without despair of life.” ~ (Albert Camus).

131. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” ~ (Albert Camus).

132. “Life can be magnificent and overwhelming – that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.” ~ (Albert Camus).

133. “Betrayal answers betrayal, the mask of love is answered by the disappearance of love.” ~ (Albert Camus).

134. “Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.” ~ (Albert Camus).

135. “The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.” ~ (Albert Camus).

136. “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.” ~ (Albert Camus).

137. “What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.” ~ (Albert Camus).

138. “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.” ~ (Albert Camus).

139. “All I know of morality I learned from football.” ~ (Albert Camus).

140. “To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.” ~ (Albert Camus).

141. “The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.” ~ (Albert Camus).

142. “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” ~ (Albert Camus).

143. “I’ve seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism; I know it’s easy and I’ve learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.” ~ (Albert Camus).

144. “Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.” ~ (Albert Camus).

145. “Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” ~ (Albert Camus).

146. “A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.” ~ (Albert Camus).

147. “Travel breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Stripped of our props, deprived of our masks, we are completely on the surface of ourselves.” ~ (Albert Camus).

148. “It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.” ~ (Albert Camus).

149. “So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.” ~ (Albert Camus).

150. “Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.” ~ (Albert Camus).



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Chandan Negi
Chandan Negi

I’m the Founder of Internet Pillar - I love sharing quotes and motivational content to inspire and motivate people - #quotes #motivation #internetpillar