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Albert Camus Love Quotes and Sayings
#1 Conscious Death, A Happy Death, Translated from the French by Richard Howard [S]
1. …we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
#2 The Fall, 1956
2. You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer ‘yes’ without having asked any clear question.
#3 Albert Camus: Notebooks, 1935 – 1951, VOLUME 1: 1935-1942, 54
3. I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.
#4 Return to Tipasa, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
4. For there is only misfortune in not being loved; there is misery in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misery. This is because blood and hatred lay bare the heart itself; the long demand for justice exhausts even the love that gave it birth.
#5 Return to Tipasa, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
5. Once you have had the chance to love intensely, your life is spent in search of the same light and the same ardor.
#6 Return to Tipasa, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
6. On certain mornings, as we turn a corner, an exquisite dew falls on our heart and then vanishes. But the freshness lingers, and this, always, is what the heart needs.
#7 Conscious Death, A Happy Death, Translated from the French by Richard Howard [S]
7. …the opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
#8 Conscious Death, A Happy Death, Translated from the French by Richard Howard [S]
8. Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory . . . Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it.
#9 The First Man
9. There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts…
#10 The Absurd Man, The myth of Sisyphus, and other essays [S]
10. There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.
#11 Notebooks, 1935-1942, Translated from the French, and with a pref. and notes, by Philip Thody [S]
11. A time comes when one can no longer feel the emotion of love. The only thing left is tragedy. Living for someone or for something no longer has any meaning. Nothing seems to keep its meaning except the idea of dying for something.
#12 Rebellion and Art, The Rebel, TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY ANTHONY BOWER [S]
12. The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
#13 The Plague, Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert [S]
13. …nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Albert Camus (7 November 1913–4 January 1960) was a French Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was a key philosopher of the 20th-century and his most famous work is the novel L’Étranger (The Stranger).
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Sayings by Albert Camus
#1 Defense of Freedom, Homage to an Exile
1. A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.
#2 Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg, 1948; reported in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (translation by Justin O’Brien, 1961), p. 73
2. 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?
#3-5 Absurd Creation, The myth of Sisyphus, and other essays, translated from the French by Justin O’Brien
3. One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it. [S]
4. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. [S]
5. To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing). [S]
#6 Absurd Walls, An Absurd Reasoning, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, translated from the French by Justin O’Brien
6. All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. [S]
#7 Introduction, The Rebel: An essay on man in revolt, Translated from the French by Anthony Bower [S]
7. Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
#8 Absolute Negation, Metaphysical Rebellion, The Rebel: An essay on man in revolt, Translated from the French by Anthony Bower [S]
8. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
#9 Rebellion and Art, The Rebel: An essay on man in revolt, Translated from the French by Anthony Bower [S]
9. No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.
#10 Beyond Nihilism, Thought at the Meridian, The Rebel: An essay on man in revolt, Translated from the French by Anthony Bower [S]
10. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
#11 Moderation and Excess, Thought at the Meridian, The Rebel: An essay on man in revolt, Translated from the French by Anthony Bower [S]
11. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
#11 The Absurd Man, The myth of Sisyphus, and other essays, translated from the French by Justin O’Brien [S]
11. There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.
#12-16 A Happy Death, TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY RICHARD HOWARD
12. In order to be happy, time is necessary—a great deal of time. Happiness too is a long patience. (Afterword)
13. Don’t think I’m saying that money makes happiness. I only mean that for a certain class of beings happiness is possible, provided they have time, and that having money is a way of being free of money. (Natural Death)
14. …it’s better to bet on this life than on the next. (Natural Death)
15. It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about. (Conscious Death)
16. …to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. (Conscious Death)
#17 American Journals, 1978
17. Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
#18 Intuitions, October 1932, published in Youthful Writings, 1976
18. 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.
#19-20 Return to Tipasa, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
19. In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
20. …there is a will to live without refusing anything life offers: the virtue I honor most in this world.
#21 The Desert, II. Nuptials, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
21. We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.
#22 The Desert, II. Nuptials, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
22. But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
#23-26 The Fall, 1956
23. Besides, let’s not beat about the bush; I love life—that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life. [S]
24. Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. [S]
25. In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all. [S]
26. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object. [S]
#27 The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu)
27. What’s the autumn? A second spring when every leaf’s a flower. [S]
#28-30 Notebooks, 1963, New York, Knopf [S]
28. One thinks one has cut oneself off from the world, but it is enough to see an olive tree upright in the golden dust, or beaches glistening in the morning sun, to feel this separation melt away.
29. Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.
30. It’s going to be difficult, very difficult. But that’s no reason for not trying. (August 1937)
#31 Notebooks 1951-1959, Ryan Bloom (Translator)
31. Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
#32-33 The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; translated from the French by Justin O’Brien [S]
32. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
33. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.
#34 The Myth Of Sisyphus, translated from the French by Justin O’Brien [S]
34. Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
#35 Conquest, The Absurd Man, The Myth Of Sisyphus, translated from the French by Justin O’Brien [S]
35. A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
#36 Minotaur, or The Stop in Oran, The Myth Of Sisyphus, translated from the French by Justin O’Brien [S]
36. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time.
#37 Act I, The Misunderstanding, Caligula & three other plays, Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert [S]
37. It is quite true that a man needs happiness, but he also needs to find his true place in the world.
#38 Act II, Caligula, Caligula & three other plays, Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert [S]
38. To lose one’s life is no great matter; when the time comes I’ll have the courage to lose mine. But what’s intolerable is to see one’s life being drained of meaning, to be told there’s no reason for existing. A man can’t live without some reason for living.
#39 Conscious Death, A Happy Death, A HAPPY DEATH, TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY RICHARD HOWARD [S]
39. You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness.
#40 Conscious Death, A Happy Death, A HAPPY DEATH, TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY RICHARD HOWARD [S]
40. You have so much inside you, and the noblest sense of happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
#41 Love of Life, Lyrical and critical essays, Edited and with Notes by Philip Thody, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
41. There is no love of life without despair of life.
#42 On Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, Lyrical and critical essays, Edited and with Notes by Philip Thody, Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy [S]
42. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live.
#43 Notebooks 1942-1951, Translated from the French and annotated by Justin O’Brien [S]
43. When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him…
#44 The Plague, Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert [S]
44. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.
#45 The Plague, Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert [S]
45. … Dr Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favour of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
#46 Absurd Freedom, An Absurd Reasoning, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, translated from the French by Justin O’Brien
46. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. [S]
Albert Camus, Stockholm, Photo credit: Wikipedia
Unsourced Albert Camus Quotes
1. Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
2. I would like to be able to breathe — to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
3. A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
4. Live to the point of tears.
5. But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.