Albert Camus Quotes

The realization that life is absurdand cannot be an end, but only abeginning. This is a truth nearly allgreat minds have taken as their starting point.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours.

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

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

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

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.

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

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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.

The absurd is sin without God.

Meaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness.

I nudged myself closer to the ledge and closed my eyes and thought 'Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,' and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.' The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats.

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

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

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

Everything is absurd.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

We don't understand why we're here, no one's giving us an answer, religion is vague, your parents can't help because they're just people, and it's all terrible, and there's no meaning to anything.

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