Albert Camus Quotes About Reality

• The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

  Albert Camus

  Reality, Thinking, Ideas

  Albert Camus (2012). “Lyrical and Critical Essays”, p.98, Vintage

• Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

  Albert Camus

  Reality, Evil, Principles

• 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.

  Albert Camus

  Struggle, Reality, Years

• A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

  Albert Camus

  Reality, Use, Existential

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.124, Vintage

• Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

  Albert Camus

  Reality, Our World, Uprising

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.247, Vintage

• Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

  Albert Camus

  Reality, Utopia, Contradiction

  Albert Camus (2007). “Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947”, p.261, Princeton University Press

• Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

  Albert Camus

  Religious, Art, Mean

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.270, Vintage

• Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

  Albert Camus

  Book, Reality, Cities

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Fall”, p.50, Vintage

• But 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 seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death--these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.

  Albert Camus

  Dream, Rain, Struggle

• 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

  Rain, Struggle, Reality

  Albert Camus (2012). “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays”, p.258, Vintage

• Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.

  Albert Camus

  Heart, Reality, Men

• The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.

  Albert Camus

  Distance, Reality, Men

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.22, Vintage

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