Albert Camus Quotes

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

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.

Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.


I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.

Then came human beings, they wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.

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.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

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.

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

A fate is not a punishment.

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.

The Outsider

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

It was good and as if for fun, I let my head sink back into her stomach. She didn't say anything and I left it there.
I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was all blue and gold. I could feel Marie's stomach throbbing gently under the back of my neck.

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.

I realized that I'd destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where I'd been happy.
And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark.
And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.

 I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.

But I'd so often be thinking about a woman, about women in general,
about all the ones I'd known and all the occasions when I'd loved them,
that my cell would fill with faces, the embodiments of my desires.

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.

 Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

Illustrations by Darrel Perkins