It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Soon after the event on 6 August 1945 he was one of the few French editors to publicly express opposition and disgust to the United States' dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. To distinguish his ideas scholars sometimes refer to the Paradox of the Absurd when referring to "Camus's Absurd".

In an interview in 1945 Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. In 1949 Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement after his split with Garry Davis's Citizens of the World movement of which the surrealist André Breton was also a member.