Albert Camus Quotes

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

I don’t know. We’ll all be dead.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, the world is senseless, knowledge strangles.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

When you don't believe in anything except not dying, you don't really believe in anything.

You don't even live once.

I hope we're not just human garbage drifting toward a big sewer. But I think so.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

Life is absolutely unbearable. And we're going to die.

Not to be born surpasses all reckoning. The next best thing by far, when one has been born is to go back as swiftly as possible whence one came.

What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

Have all the hopes of ages come to naught? Is life no more with noble meaning fraught?

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.

Maybe the universe will get tired of me.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!