Albert Camus Quotes

To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe... it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion.

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

Nihilism is best done by professionals.

If we are just specks of dust hit by lightning, if we have no spark of God in us, why not just take whatever we can and devil take the hindmost? I mean, we are fools not to do that if there is no right or wrong.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

I asked: 'What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?' And I replied to quite another question: 'What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?' With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: 'None'.

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing , but one who does not believe in what exists.

Maybe life isn't meaningless...Maybe just YOUR life is meaningless

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.