50 Albert Camus Quotes About Life

“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”

09/10/2020 08:00:00h

50 Albert Camus Quotes About Life | iSTOCK

50 Albert Camus Quotes About Life

Albert Camus, (Algeria, 1913 - France, 1960), was a French-Algerian novelist, essayist, and playwright, best known for such novels as L’Étranger (The Stranger), La Peste (The Plague), and La Chute (The Fall) and for his work in leftist causes.

He received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming was the second youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling).

Discover some of the most famous Albert Camus quotes on life and death, happiness and suicide, rebellion and truth, fear and time, art and many more.

1“No matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

2“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”

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

4“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.”

5“Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.”

6“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.”

7“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”

8“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”

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

10“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”

11“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”

12“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

13“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”

14“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.”

15“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”

16“The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”

17“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”

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

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

20“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

21“The need to be right – the sign of a vulgar mind.”

22“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead Walk beside me… just be my friend”

23“Live to the point of tears.”

24“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”

25“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”

26“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.”

27“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

28“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

29“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

30“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”

31“Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.”

32“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”

33“To create is to live twice.”

34“We don't have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.”

35“How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.”

36“Friendship is a knowledge acquired by free men. And there is no freedom without intelligence or without mutual understanding.”

37“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”

38“Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”

39“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”

40“Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.”

41“One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.”

42“A loveless world is a dead world.”

43“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.”

44“You can’t create experience, you undergo it.”

45“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”

46"It is not paintings I like, it is your paintings."

47“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

48“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

49"Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement."

50"Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize its meaningless."

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