Albert Camus Quotes

We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.

In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

In agony or danger, no nature is atheist. The mind that knows not what to fly to, flies to God.

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.

alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.

All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.

Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker).

With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.