Albert Camus Quotes

Albert Camus (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French-Algerian author, journalist, and philosopher of the 20th century. Albert Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times". Albert Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award.

1. A loveless world is a dead world.
    
2. Peace is the only battle worth waging.
    
3. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
    
4. There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.
    
5. It's better to bet on this life than on the next.
    
6. If the world were clear, art would not exist.
    
7. We all have a weakness for beauty.
    
8. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
    
9. Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
    
10. It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
     
11. There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
     
12. It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
     
13. We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
     
14. 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."
     
15. 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.
     
16. To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
     
17. 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.
     
18. With rebellion, awareness is born.
     
19. Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.
     
20. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
     
21. Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
     
22. Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.
     
23. 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.
     
24. 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.
     
25. To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
     
26. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
     
27. Having money is a way of being free of money.
     
28. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
     
29. I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
     
30. The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good conscience by shouting to them: if you want the happiness of the people, let them speak out and tell what kind of happiness they want and what kind they don't want! But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom.
     
31. I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.
     
32. When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
     
33. There is not love of life without despair about life.
     
34. Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
     
35. Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.