Albert Camus Quotes

Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, the world is senseless, knowledge strangles.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

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.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

If I was to say I had a life, that would be a lie.

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.

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

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.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

I searched all areas of knowledge, and not only did I fail to find anything, but I was convinced that all those who had explored as I did had also come up with nothing. Not only had they found nothing, but they had clearly acknowledged the same thing that had brought me to despair: the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.

It was over now, and the meaningless world was tolerable and need not be explained. And never would it be, and how foolish I had ever been to think so.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt.