Albert Camus Quotes

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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

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

The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.

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.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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

Nothing is proved, all is permitted.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.

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.

Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it.

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

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

Probably the only way Woody Allen and I are similar is that he has a lot to say about Nietzsche.

I'm a card-carrying existentialist.

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

The absurd is sin without God.

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

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.

I'm simply a nonbeliever and have been forever. ... I'm interested in saying, 'Let us discuss the existential question. We are all going to die, that is the end of all consciousness. There is no afterlife. There is no God. Now what do we do.' That's the point where it starts getting interesting to me.

The Gay Science, section 108

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.