5 Powerful Quotes by Albert Camus that Prove Life is Absurd

Words of wisdom on life’s absurdities from his debut novel, “The Stranger”

Life is absurd. One of the reasons to believe this idea is this quote by Albert Camus:

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

Funny and deep at the same time, isn’t it?

This and many other quotes made me spiral down the realms of thinking as I devoured,word-by-word, Albert Camus’s, “The Stranger”. I had set out to do it in a single sitting, owing to its short length of 123-pages. But by the time I neared the end, I was pretty sure it would take me several readings to process what he’d written.

I was amazed. At 29, Albert was already a strong proponent of the absurdist philosophy- the idea that man’s search for meaning in life is humanely absurd and impossible. In fact, so devout was he to this idea that he not only lived by it but also shaped his life’s works around the same. In “The Stranger”, Camus uses absurdism to subvert, page-by-page, some of life’s deep-rooted beliefs the hands of his protagonist, Meursault.

In this article, I pick 5 profound quotes that present themselves in the book as Meursault’s thoughts and delve deep into them in search of life’s meanings through the lens of absurdity. No matter who you are or what you do, these 5 quotes will make as much sense to you standalone as they do as a part of the novel.

On Personal Needs Betraying Social Needs

I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings. The day I buried Maman, I was very tired and sleepy, so much so that I wasn’t really aware of what was going on.

Can anyone be so insensitive as to be unmoved by their mothers’ death? Maybe yes if their needs are different from worrying about their dead mother. Throughout the novel, Meursault is accused of being insensitive to the death of his mother. So much so, that days later when he gets convicted for a completely unrelated crime, the lawyer uses this argument as a pivot point to prove his “sordid” and relentless nature in the court.

Come to think of it, haven’t all of us been secretly guilty of this crime multiple times in our lives? Isn’t this a battle all of us fight in our hearts multiple times in a day? The battle between our physical needs-what we think is of imminent importance to us-and our mental and emotional needs-what we know is essential for us to survive in the society.

Needs such as the urge to scratch our private parts in a public place. Or to love the one forbidden.

It is this subdued, albeit natural instinct, that we spend all our lives fighting- an instinct to function against the way the society expects us to function. It is our rebellious needs getting in the way of our feelings that result in diverse actions the world often labels as “crimes”.

On the Concept of Punishment

Later on I realized that that too was part of the punishment. But by then I had gotten used to not smoking and it wasn’t a punishment anymore.

Think of five things that you can’t imagine your life without today. Now, imagine yourself trapped in a 4 by 4 dank cell without any of these things to survive by. How many days would it take for you to die due to the lack of these things? You know the answer. You won’t.

And yet, all of us are instilled with the fear of losing out on life as “punishment” ever since our childhood days. It begins with trivial things such as toys and treats and scales onto seemingly important ones, such as people, money, and luxuries. So much so that we begin to believe that life is impossible without them and that in their absence, we’d die. This goes on till circumstances force us to live without our “necessities”. And then, a new reality materializes in front of us. One that we have never imagined for ourselves in the past-the reality we annotate in the English language as “moving on” or “getting over” our needs.

On the Power of a Man’s Thoughts

I realized that a man who had lived only one day could live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.

When Meursault finds himself within lifeless prison walls, it takes a few days for the reality of an imprisoned life to dawn onto him. In order to pass time in the prison in the absence of women and cigarettes-his two obsessions, he resorts to dreaming to while away his time. He begins recollecting the tiniest details of his room in a clockwise direction-from the furniture to the object on the furniture and the scrapes and marks on them. This eases his torturous empty hours inside the jail. Given the vile nature of thoughts, it is then that he realizes that thinking, is both a curse and a boon in the prison world. If you put your thoughts into the right kind of things, you could easily pass your time just by thinking and towing with your thoughts.

For anyone who lives for just one day in the outside world will have enough to thoughts to keep thinking for a long time.

But imagine if those thoughts became poisonous. They would have the power to eat you from within.

On the Concept of a Day

I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same time : long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only the words “yesterday” and “today” had any meaning for me.

How would you define a day? Scratch the calendar definition. I’m talking about your day. Does it begin in the wee hours of the morning? Or does it kick into gear when the sun is high up in the sky? Or is it an endless mass of time stretching endlessly with no breaks to separate one day from the other?

If you’re anything like me, your life is a combination of these days. On days when you’re overjoyed with life, brimming with the zeal to live, wheezing about with the idea that the day belongs to no one but you, your days are distinct units of time carefully separated by dates. Each date is a happy milestone. On other days, when you’d rather wish life were not, or when you’re eagerly anticipating the arrival of a time in the future, each of these days stretches till eternity. The sun takes so longer than normal hours to bid adieu and pave way for the next day. On most days in between these two types of days, its an endless cycle of yesterday and today you so profoundly live through without giving much thought to it.

On the Subjective Nature of Everything Inside and Around us

Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day . . . as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.

I could write a book on this quote and not be at a loss of words.

In prison, Meursault floats in the sea of uncertainty. His fate is at the mercy of a judicial system that doesn’t care what happens to lives as long as the system are up and running. On his way back to the prison before the day of the final verdict, he takes a longing look at the sky from the darkness of the prison van and reminisces about better times gone by under the same skies as a free man. Days of doing the same from the comfort of his balcony in simpler times come back to him. It is then that it draws on him that even though individual lives can change drastically in a matter of hours, the world on the whole still remains the same.

The change manifests only in the subjective sense of the individual’s conscience.

On the Human Helplessness in Certain Circumstances

My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion. There were times when I felt like breaking in on all of them and saying, “Wait a minute! Who’s the accused here? Being the accused counts for something. And I have something to say!”

This is your life. You know its true, as true as day and night. But how much control do you have over it? Think of the things you can control in your lives. Doesn’t even fit on the ten fingers in your hand, does it?

In reality, much like court proceedings, our fates are not always products of our actions. In fact, for the most part of it, we don’t have a say in our lives. Although we strive to achieve this control every day, there is a limit to how much we can control. Just as our fates in the court of law are not always dependent on how lawful we’ve been or how qualified our lawyer is, most of our how our lives turn out is rarely dependent on our actions in life. This ideology justifies the fact that without any fault of our own, we were born into a socially and economically disparaging world.

Closing Notes

The book moved something irreversible inside me. Once I finished it, I couldn’t help but dig into the life and times of Albert Camus. It took me little time to understand that in Meursault Camus saw himself.

It’s a pity we lost the genius of a man when he was only 44. He didn’t leave a memoir for us to gain a deeper insight into his unique and absurd thoughts on life. However, if one is attentive enough, the books he’s left behind are enough to understand his ideas. In his own words,

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

You just need to read between the lines.

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