Albert Camus Quotes

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

Without God, life has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning. Without meaning, life has no significance or hope.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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.

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

Existence is not a mystery unless you think it has a meaning.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it.

If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.