Quotes from A Happy Death

Albert Camus ·  192 pages

Rating: (8K votes)


“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always decieve ourselves twice about the people we love-first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death



“People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“To think the way you do, you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.

On both perhaps.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death



“When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Like that sky. It's rain and sun both, noon and midnight. ... I think of the lips I've kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I'm all those things at once. I'm sure there are times when you wouldn't even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness—I can't say it.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters- all that matters, really- is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest- women, art, success- is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death



“Yes, I'm happy, in human terms.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“Crois-moi, il n'y a pas de grande douleur, pas de grands repentirs, de grands souvenirs. Tout s'oublie même les grandes amours. C'est ce qu'il y a de triste et d'exaltant à la fois dans la vie. Il y a seulement une certaine façon de voir les choses et elle surgit de temps en temps. C'est pour ça qu'il est bon quand même d'avoir eu un grand amour, une passion malheureuse dans sa vie. Ça fait du moins un alibi pour les désespoirs sans raison dont nous sommes accablés.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death



“Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“There is something divine in mindless beauty.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death


“Beyond the curve of his days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity--happiness was human, eternity ordinary.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death



About the author

Albert Camus
Born place: in Mondovi, Algeria
Born date November 7, 1913
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“The mathematics stacks were as silent and empty as ever—apparently no one suspected the riches hidden there.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Housekeeper and the Professor


“Talent is something rare and beautiful and precious,
and it must not be allowed to go to waste.”
― George Selden, quote from The Cricket in Times Square


“I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I'd been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.”
― Paul Auster, quote from Leviathan


“The citizens of the City of Rome, therefore, could not believe it when toward the end of the first decade of the fifth century, they woke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and all his forces parked at their gates. He might as well have been the king of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, or any other of the inconsequential outlanders that civilized people have looked down their noses at throughout history. It was preposterous. They dispatched a pair of envoys to conduct the tiresome negotiation and send him away. The envoys began with empty threats: any attack on Rome was doomed, for it would be met by invincible strength and innumerable ranks of warriors. Alaric was a sharp man, and in his rough fashion a just one. He also had a sense of humor. “The thicker the grass, the more easily scythed,” he replied evenly. The envoys quickly recognized that their man was no fool. All right, then, what was the price of his departure? Alaric told them: his men would sweep through the city, taking all gold, all silver, and everything of value that could be moved. They would also round up and cart off every barbarian slave. But, protested the hysterical envoys, what will that leave us? Alaric paused. “Your lives.” In that pause, Roman security died and a new world was conceived.”
― Thomas Cahill, quote from How the Irish Saved Civilization


“You can get so that every step, every little obstacle on the battlefield, becomes so big that you can’t see much past it, and when you do get past, it’s sometimes hard to remember what the hell you were supposed to be doing.”
― Robert Hicks, quote from The Widow of the South


Interesting books

After We Collided
(28.1K)
After We Collided
by Anna Todd
Present Perfect
(12.8K)
Present Perfect
by Alison G. Bailey
The Dominant
(10K)
The Dominant
by Tara Sue Me
Hyperspace
(16.6K)
Hyperspace
by Michio Kaku
This is Falling
(9.4K)
This is Falling
by Ginger Scott
امربیل (Amar Bail)
(1.1K)
امربیل (Amar Bail)
by Umera Ahmed

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.