Albert Camus Quotes

Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own... the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

I'm afraid of death... Yes, but that doesn't stop death coming.

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn't given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.

I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.

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

It's strange. There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?

We know that death never skips or spares anybody and that no one ever returns. And yet we go on like the blind, who see as little at midday as in the pitch-dark night. We do not take these examples to heart; we do not realize that today or tomorrow our turn will come.

The only way to live is to die. I must die. I deserve only death.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you're dead. That's how I feel about things.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

I don’t know. We’ll all be dead.