Top 10 Albert Camus Quotes

Albert Camus
(Philosopher)

Albert Camus  was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as a follower of it, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked."
Camus was born in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family and studied at the University of Algiers, from which he graduated in 1936. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to "denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA"

Top 10 Albert Camus Quotes

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

He who despairs over an event is a coward but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.

The struggle to the top is in itself enough to fulfill the human heart. Sisyphus should be regarded as happy.

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible

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.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend. 

Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Dréan (then known as Mondovi) in French Algeria. His mother was of Spanish descent and could only hear out of her left ear. His father, Lucien, a poor agricultural worker of Alsatian descent, was wounded in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I, while serving as a member of a Zouave infantry regiment. Lucien died from his wounds in a makeshift army hospital on 11 October. Camus and his mother, an illiterate house cleaner, lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers.
In 1923, Camus was accepted into the Lycée Bugeaud (fr) and eventually was admitted to the University of Algiers. After he contracted tuberculosis in 1930, he had to end his football activities; he had been a goalkeeper for a prominent Algerian university team. In addition, he was only able to study part-time. To earn money, he took odd jobs: as a private tutor, car parts clerk, and assistant at the Meteorological Institute. He completed his licence de philosophie (BA) in 1936; in May 1936, he successfully presented his thesis on Plotinus, "Rapports de l'hellénisme et du christianisme à travers les oeuvres de Plotin et de saint Augustin" ("Relationship of Greek and Christian thought in Plotinus and St. Augustine"), for his diplôme d'études supérieures (fr) (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis).
Camus joined the French Communist Party in early 1935, seeing it as a way to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria." He did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, but did write, "We might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities."[5] In 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party (PCA) was founded. Camus joined the activities of the Algerian People's Party (Le Parti du Peuple Algérien), which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades, who in 1937 denounced him as a Trotskyite and expelled him from the party. Camus then became associated with the French anarchist movement
The anarchist André Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Étudiants Anarchistes (Anarchist Student Circle) as a sympathiser familiar with anarchist thought. Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La révolution Prolétarienne, and Solidaridad Obrera (Workers' Solidarity), the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labor). Camus stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the uprising of 1953 in East Germany. He again allied with the anarchists in 1956, first in support of the workers' uprising in Poznan, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution.

Camus died on 4 January 1960 at the age of 46, in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute he accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him.
The driver of the Facel Vega HK500 car, Michel Gallimard (fr), who was Camus's publisher and close friend, died five days after the accident. In August 2011, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera reported a theory that the writer had been the victim of a Soviet plot, but Camus's biographer, Olivier Todd (fr), did not consider it credible. Camus was buried in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Lourmarin, Vaucluse, France.
He was the second-youngest recipient, at the age of 44, of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, at the age of 42.