Albert Camus Quotes

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

Sometimes living is not so light and easy and you need a representation of life in front of you. It's a fake reorganization of reality. You start to feel, "I'm not so alone in the world because I can recognize exactly the same feelings."

Man, some modern philosophers tell us, is alienated from his world: he is a stranger and afraid in a world he never made. Perhaps he is; yet so are animals, and even plants. They too were born, long ago, into a physico-chemical world, a world they never made.

Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.

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.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact

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

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

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

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.

You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.

Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.

To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow.

We're not meant for happiness, you and I.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

There is a kind of universality in the human condition, masculine or feminine. That's one thing I continue to believe.

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie , concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man.