Albert Camus Quotes

Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be.

Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"

Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

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?

The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd.

Oh yeah, this was so comforting. Like a porcupine in a condom factory.’ (Danger)

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

Love and magic are like oil and water--they just don't mix.