Albert Camus Quotes

Quotes by and about Albert Camus

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Camus: "There is not love of life without despair about life."

Camus: "Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."

Camus: "In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

Camus: "For years I've wanted to live according to everyone else's morals. I've forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth - after having lived all my life in a sort of lie."

Joern Boisen: "[Camus] is a ... timeless figure: The loner who dares speak up against the power and for those who are wronged, being bound only by his conscience."

Joern Boisen: "There was something plain, jovial and commonplace about him, which caused people to instinctively feel a connection with him; as if they were friends without ever having met."

Joern Boisen: "Camus is not the greatest philosopher of the 20th century but he is perhaps the most popular and personable."

Joern Boisen: "There is ... something paradoxical about our admiration of Camus. We all say that we should be more like Camus - idealistic - but in our daily lives, we behave more like Sartre - strategically."

Daniel Eriksson: "[Unlike Sartre] Camus always felt that one must tell the truth, even when the truth is not convenient."

Daniel Eriksson: "[If more people were like Camus] there would be more whistleblowers and fewer people who just 'do their job' in life."