Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate. He was was born in the town of Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist as well as organizing the Théâtre de l’équipe, a young avant-garde dramatic group. In 1934, he joined the Communist Party in reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe. In 1941, after the Nazi invasion of France, Camus joined the Resistance and wrote for the underground newspaper Combat. Albert Camus is best known for the topics of Absurd, Existentialism and problems of human conscious. In 1957, only at the age of 44, he won the Nobel Prize “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”. He died in a car accident on January 4, 1960.
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Top Facts about Albert Camus
- Camus is the first African born writer to Win the Nobel Prize
- Camus disliked being labelled an existentialist.
- At the age of 21, Albert Camus married Simone Hie, but after two years, the marriage was dissolved.
- In 1934, he joined the Communist Party in reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe but was later expelled because of his support of Algerian nationalism.
- Albert Camus was a soccer player but due to tuberculosis he stopped playing at the age of 17
Short Video of Albert Camus’ Biography
Albert Camus Quotes
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
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
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love. But for those others who aspired beyond and above the human individual toward something they could not even imagine, there had been no answer
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
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.
Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.
Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically gettin killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Life is a sum of all your choices.
[…] the writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.