Albert Camus famous quotes

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
-- Albert Camus

#Understanding #Experience

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
-- Albert Camus

#Suicide #Coffee #Optimistic

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
-- Albert Camus

#Wisdom #Peace #Jobs

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Gratitude #Real

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

#Freedom #Badass #Bad Ass

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
-- Albert Camus

#Love #Life #Valentines Day

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

#Funny #Positivity #Bad Ass

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
-- Albert Camus

#Heart #Waiting #Solitude

Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
-- Albert Camus

#Memories #Roots #Shadow

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Order #People

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
-- Albert Camus

#Happiness And Love #Principles #Refuse

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
-- Albert Camus

#Punishment #Death Penalty #Murder

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
-- Albert Camus

#Thinking #Reality #Ideas

If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.
-- Albert Camus

#Made #Perceive #Meetings

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
-- Albert Camus

#Falling In Love #Despair #Existentialism

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

#Love #Friendship #Happy

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
-- Albert Camus

#Writing #Civilization #Purpose

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
-- Albert Camus

#Soul #Suffering #Too Much

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

#Life #Summer #Recovery

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Justice #Trying

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #World #Indifference

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
-- Albert Camus

#Suffering #Unhappy #Happiness And Love

I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.
-- Albert Camus

#Beach #Wind #Waiting

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
-- Albert Camus

#Lonely #Stars #Philosophy

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Dying #Causes

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational #Happiness #Happy

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.
-- Albert Camus

#Risk #Being Loved

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

#Art #Work #Simple

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
-- Albert Camus

#Solitude #Religion #Weight

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.
-- Albert Camus

#Compassion #Ideas #People

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
-- Albert Camus

#Lying #Fiction #Telling The Truth

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Truth #Atheism

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
-- Albert Camus

#Sleep #Insomnia #People

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
-- Albert Camus

#Struggle #Passion #Existentialism

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
-- Albert Camus

#Motivational #Inspiring #Should

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
-- Albert Camus

#Teacher #Retirement #Book

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Men #Opposites

We are all special cases.
-- Albert Camus

#Teacher #Appreciation #Special

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
-- Albert Camus

#Motivational #Change #Men

There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Goodness #Clear

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

#Fall #Rocks #Punishment

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
-- Albert Camus

#Country #Justice #Able

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational Life #Meaning Of Life

They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
-- Albert Camus

#Sometimes #Humans

Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.
-- Albert Camus

#Love Is #Vanity #Two

To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.
-- Albert Camus

#Passion #Compassion #Grows

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
-- Albert Camus

#Atheist #Believe #Religion

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
-- Albert Camus

#Reality #Use #Symbols

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
-- Albert Camus

#Melancholy

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.
-- Albert Camus

#Heroism #Difficult

Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
-- Albert Camus

#Greatness #Trying #Way

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

#Love #Beauty #Time

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
-- Albert Camus

#Stupid #Stupidity #Knack

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
-- Albert Camus

#Peace #War #Tyrants

It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.
-- Albert Camus

#Art #Struggle #Artist

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

#If There Is A God #Religion #Living My Life

Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational #Life #Waiting

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
-- Albert Camus

#Broken Heart #Teacher #Lost Love

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

#Government #Definitions #Sometimes

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
-- Albert Camus

#Encouraging #Nature #Spring

Integrity has no need of rules.
-- Albert Camus

#Honesty #Integrity #Needs

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

#Art #Hipster #Needs

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
-- Albert Camus

#Struggle #Heart #Hard Times

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

#Life #Hate #War

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
-- Albert Camus

#Friendship #Honesty #Believe

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.
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Hands #Numbers

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

#Life #Honesty #Integrity

Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational #Asking #Answers

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-- Albert Camus

#Knowledge #Responsibility #Intellectual

To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
-- Albert Camus

#Happiness #Being Happy #Laughter

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
-- Albert Camus

#Funny #Spiritual #Witty

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
-- Albert Camus

#Birthday #Men #Age

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
-- Albert Camus

#Suicide #Philosophy #Philosophical

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
-- Albert Camus

#Painting

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

#Citizens #Indirect #Notes

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
-- Albert Camus

#Happiness #Success #Happy

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Truth #Passion

What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
-- Albert Camus

#Men #Rebel #Doe

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Courage #Real

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.
-- Albert Camus

#Beautiful #Art #Majority

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

#Life #Happiness #Happy

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
-- Albert Camus

#Law #Democracy #Majority

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
-- Albert Camus

#Inspirational #Life #Men

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
-- Albert Camus

#Beautiful #Truth #Honesty

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
-- Albert Camus

#Dream #People #Elsewhere

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

#Heart #World #Chaos

All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
-- Albert Camus

#Happiness #Encouragement #Goes On

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.
-- Albert Camus

#Excess #Disappear #Misers

...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
-- Albert Camus

#Art #Creation

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
-- Albert Camus

#Suicide #Suicidal #Needs

We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
-- Albert Camus

#Order #Live And Let Live

You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
-- Albert Camus

#Justice #Soul #Able

Ah cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They are They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!
-- Albert Camus

#Suicide #Sacrifice #Men

In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.
-- Albert Camus

#Believe #Artist #World

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
-- Albert Camus

#Order #Trying

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
-- Albert Camus

#Life #Time #Men

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
-- Albert Camus

#Happiness #Son #Two

There are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye
-- Albert Camus

#Eye #Fate #People

The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
-- Albert Camus

#Struggle #Heart #Human Heart

Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.
-- Albert Camus

#History #Evil #Historical