Albert Camus Quotes

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose.

Man is a history—making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless.

No one is free from the history he has inherited.

History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please …. All history is the record of man’s signal failure to thwart his destiny.

History is about what people do within the limits of their landscape, their needs, and their past.

Nothing is inevitable in history.

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.

Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.

What man is, only his history tells.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

History is at once freedom and necessity.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.

Every man must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.

We cannot lead a choiceless life. Every day, every moment, every second, there is a choice. If it were not so, we would not be individuals.