Albert Camus Life Quotations

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

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

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.

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.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

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

There is no love of life without despair of life.

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.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

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

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

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

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

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

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

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Life is a sum of all your choices.

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.

Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it's meaningless.

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.

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.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

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

Life is the sum of your choices.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

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.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

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

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

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

...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

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

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

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.

Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.

Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.

I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.

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

... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.

The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

Men die and they are not happy.

In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.

The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

Life is the result of all your choices.

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.

Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.

To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.

life is a story and god is author.life is absurd.I think so.

If there is sin against life, it consists... in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

If there is sin against life, it consists in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life

) it is the image of this woman, sitting idly be her Algiers window indifferently watching life pass her by. He pities his mother but that is not the same as love. Feeling this detachment, he can begin to understand her unhappiness.