He was a novelist, philosopher, journalist, essayist of French-Algerian origin. Although known primarily for his novels and philosophical works, Camus was also a man of the theatre. He worked at various times as an actor, director, playwright, and translator for the stage.
He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. Camus was closely linked to his friend existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s, but he broke with him over Sartre’s support to Stalinist politics. Camus died at the age of forty-six in a car accident near Sens, France. He was a key philosopher of the 20th-century. (1913-1960)
– Albert Camus Quotes –
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.
~ Albert Camus
Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.
~ Albert Camus
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
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise… that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
~ Albert Camus
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
~ Albert Camus
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
~ Albert Camus
Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
~ Albert Camus
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
We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.
~ Albert Camus
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without ever having asked a clear question.
~ Albert Camus
If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.
~ Albert Camus
Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course.
~ Albert Camus
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
~ Albert Camus
What would justice be without the chance for happiness? What purpose would freedom serve, if we had to live in misery?
~ Albert Camus
I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.
~ Albert Camus
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
~ Albert Camus
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that’s the best they can hope for.
~ Albert Camus
In our wildest aberrations, we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
~ Albert Camus
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
~ Albert Camus
Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?
~ Albert Camus
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it- just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same seashore.
~ Albert Camus
Who would dare speak the word “happiness” in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? And who could say that they are wrong?
~ Albert Camus
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.
~ Albert Camus
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
~ Albert Camus
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
~ Albert Camus
We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
~ Albert Camus
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future – and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
~ Albert Camus
If I think that happiness is possible, I know all too well its hidden nature–and by what wretched paradox, instead of being an excess that would elevate us in dignity, it is a numbness we are only aware of afterward.
~ Albert Camus
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
~ Albert Camus
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.
~ Albert Camus
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds — a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents.
~ Albert Camus
Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradictions; therefore it destroys freedom.
~ Albert Camus
