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 clarity, moderation, and tolerance. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
Camus was born in Mondovi, French Algeria, now the coastal town of Dréan. His 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.)
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 most celebrated 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.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Albert Camus
Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lies the freedom of art.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Art
Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to what is present.
—Albert Camus
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Forgiveness
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and “historical tasks” is an actual or potential assassin.
—Albert Camus
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
—Albert Camus
Topics: How to Live, Energy
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Stupidity
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions
More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Revolutions, Revolution
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Peace
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Beauty
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Philosophy
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.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Perfection
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Experience
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Theory, Assumptions
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Christianity
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Beginnings, Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Culture
Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked or made use of. As for being understood, never.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Understanding
Without work all life goes rotten.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Work
Integrity needs no rules.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Character
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
—Albert Camus
Topics: City Life, Cities
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Death
In the depth of winter I finally learned there was inside me an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Potential, Hope, Summer, Learn, Difficulties, Confidence, Adversity, Win, Seasons, Attitude
I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Character, Judgment
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Fear, Anxiety, Respect, Respectability
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
—Albert Camus
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Power
If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Nature
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Courage
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Misery, Money
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
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: Candor, Illusion, Friendship
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Fight, Revolution
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Questions, Manners, Charm
Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Greatness
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
—Albert Camus
Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence [His Or Her] heart first opened.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Work
When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Man, Mankind
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Happiness
Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.
—Albert Camus
Topics: Revolution, Revolutionaries, Revolutions
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