Albert Camus Quotes

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd.

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

Meaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

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

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.

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

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.

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

Everything is absurd.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?

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