Camus Death Quotes

#1. There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

Albert Camus

#2. As the death of the writer exaggerates the role of his work, the death of a person exaggerates the role of his effect on us.

Albert Camus

#3. Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

Albert Camus

#4. In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.

Albert Camus

#5. Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.

Albert Camus

#6. Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my
revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of
consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation
to death - and I refuse suicide.

Albert Camus

#7. They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality.

Albert Camus

#8. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.

Albert Camus

#9. Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.

Albert Camus

#10. Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

Albert Camus

#11. The appalling society of tyrants and slaves in
which we survive will find its death and transfiguration only on the level of creation.

Albert Camus

#12. For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Albert Camus

#13. Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

Albert Camus

#14. Most people imagine that a man suffers because out of the blue, Death snatches away the woman he loves. But his real suffering is less futile; it comes from the discovery that grief, too, cannot last. Even grief is vanity!

Albert Camus

#15. Death will be my supreme protest against a world of tears and blood.

Albert Camus

#16. Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.

Albert Camus

#17. But if that is what it meant to win the game, how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, and deprived of what one hopes. [...] There is no peace without hope [...] A warmth of life and an image of death: that was knowledge.

Albert Camus

#18. He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Albert Camus

#19. Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.

Albert Camus

#20. In fact, if there had ever been one real revolution, there would be no more history. Unity
would have been achieved, and death would have been satiated. That is why all revolutionaries finally
aspire to world unity and act as though they believed that history was concluded.

Albert Camus

#21. All normal people, I added as an after thought, had more or less desired the death of those they loved, at some point or another.

Albert Camus

#22. It is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.

Albert Camus

#23. Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.

Albert Camus

#24. I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.

Albert Camus

#25. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.

Albert Camus

#26. It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: Close the window, it's too beautiful.

Albert Camus

#27. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

Albert Camus

#28. In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death ... these are things that unite us all.

Albert Camus

#29. And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.

Albert Camus

#30. The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

Albert Camus

#31. He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe

Albert Camus

#32. In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.

Albert Camus

#33. Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

Albert Camus

#34. In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.

Albert Camus

#35. It is then possible to say that rebellion, when it develops into destruction, is illogical. Claiming the unity
of the human condition, it is a force of life, not of death. Its most profound logic is not the logic of
destruction; it is the logic of creation.

Albert Camus

#36. The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.

Albert Camus

#37. A life, whose purpose is money, is death.

Albert Camus

#38. In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

Albert Camus

#39. I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

Albert Camus

#40. There is but one freedom, To put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved, and not the reverse.

Albert Camus

#41. What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

Albert Camus

#42. Not that one must be an
animal, but I find no meaning in the happiness of angels. I know
simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call
eternity except what will continue after my death?

Albert Camus

#43. For Sade, man's emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of
debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules over the life and death of the men and women who
have committed themselves forever to the hell of their desires.

Albert Camus

#44. Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

Albert Camus

#45. Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?

Albert Camus

#46. Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

Albert Camus

#47. Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.

Albert Camus

#48. On the pitiless earth where lovers are often separated in death and are always born
divided, the total possession of another human being and absolute communion throughout an entire
lifetime are impossible dreams.

Albert Camus

#49. There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

Albert Camus

#50. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

Albert Camus

#51. The only picture of Tarrou he would always have would be the picture of a man who firmly gripped the steering-wheel of his car when driving, or else the picture of that stalwart body, now lying motionless. Knowing meant that: a living warmth, and a picture of death.

Albert Camus

#52. The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.

Albert Camus

#53. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Albert Camus