Albert Camus Quotes

The human condition is endlessly fascinating to me, and the existential horrors of life are what drive our imaginations and theater in general.

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

There were some who said that a man at the point of death was more free than all others, because death breaks every bond, and over the dead the united world has no power.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

We have no choice, we must all die. How we live, however, is entirely of our choosing.

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

Man, who wert once a despot and a slave, A dupe and a deceiver! a decay, A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day.

Loving and perishing: it's been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die.