Albert Camus (1913–60) was a French novelist, playwright, and philosopher. He was the most prominent French literary talent of his generation. He defined existentialist philosophy and dominated postwar thinking. His work is characterized by lucidity, moderation, and tolerance. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957.
Camus was fixated with the philosophical problems of the meaning of life and of man’s hard-fought struggle for values and meaning in a world without God. Camus was widely admired in the 1940s and 1950s as a champion of the resistance, a model for the younger generation, a defender of the oppressed, and a custodian of the moral conscience of Europe.
Born in Mondovi, French Algeria, now Dréan, Camus’s upbringing in working-class European milieu provided the setting for many of his works. He joined the French resistance during the World War II and became co-editor (with Jean-Paul Sartre) of the left-wing movement’s bulletin Combat (1944–47.)
Camus rose rapidly to fame upon the publication of his essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955) and his first novel L’Étranger (1942; The Outsider, 1946.) These masterpieces discuss his philosophy of existentialism, in particular the experience of the “absurdity” of human existence or metaphysical nihilism.
Camus’s other notable works include the novel The Plague (1947,) and the essay The Rebel (1951.) His greatest play Caligula (1944) envisions the notorious Roman emperor as an actor whose life is a pretense, and whose cruelty and aggression grows from a sense of self-definition. Camus’s other plays The Misunderstanding (1944,) The State of Siege (1948,) and The Just Assassins (1950) further develop his existential and moral themes.
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Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Time Management
We all carry within us our prisons.
—Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Character, Integrity, Honesty
Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to what is present.
—Albert Camus
There’s no need to hang about waiting for the last judgment. It takes place every day.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Judgment
At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities … And above all, accept these things.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Acceptance, Realization, Awareness, Realistic Expectations
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
Life is the sum of all your choices.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Decisions, Life
In the depth of winter I finally learned there was inside me an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Attitude, Confidence, Adversity, Difficulties, Win, Potential, Hope, Summer
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Work
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Death
To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Action, Awareness, Self-Knowledge, Self-Discovery
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Success, Confidence, Self-reliance, One Step at a Time, Talent
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Manners, Questions, Charm
Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Friendship
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise… that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Beauty
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Happiness
We are all exceptional cases. Each man insists on being innocent, even if it means accusing the whole human race, and heaven.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Virtue
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Books, Reading
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
—Albert Camus
Topics: Happiness, Harmony
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
—Albert Camus
My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: Let us rejoice. Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths.
—Albert Camus
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
—Albert Camus
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Work, Futility
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Happiness
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and just be my friend.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Friendship, Feelings
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
—Albert Camus
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Courage
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