“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
Albert Camus
Born place: in Mondovi, Algeria
Born date November 7, 1913
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“You have come from the Citadel—I know, you see, something of your journeyings and history—that great fortress of bygone days, so you must possess some feeling for the past. Has it never struck you that mankind was richer by far, and happier too, a chiliad gone than it is now?” “Everyone knows,” I said, “that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.” “As it was then, so shall it be again. Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from Shadow and Claw
“But you are not my wife. You are a woman who will go to bed with anyone who flatters your antics. That’s”
― R.K. Narayan, quote from The Guide
“Now at first you’ll feel a little dizzy, then a little numb, then you won’t feel anything at all.”
― Damian Wampler, quote from Sevara: Dawn of Hope
“My sister says tearfully that she has a feeling that she will never see me again. I am not very much impressed, because she has felt this every time I go to the East. And what, she asks, is she to do if Rosalind gets appendicitis? There seems no reason why my fourteen-year-old daughter should get appendicitis, and all I can think of to reply is: ‘Don’t operate on her yourself!’ For my sister has a great reputation for hasty action with her scissors,”
― quote from Come, Tell Me How You Live
“We choose this. This place. This life. What it will be, and how we live it. We are not slaves to gods, or fate, or destinies woven in veils of smoke. We choose the people we want to be, and we choose the shape of the world in which we live. Nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice. There is nothing so easy as swimming with the current, nothing so difficult as being the first to stand up. To say no. To point at a thing wrong and name it so. There are none so brave as those who choose to stand, when all others are content to kneel. None so worthy of the title 'hero' as those who fight when there are none to see it. Who choose a life bereft of accolade or fanfare, a life of struggle for the idea that we are all the same. Every one of us. And every one of us has the right to be happy. To know peace. To know love.”
― Jay Kristoff, quote from Endsinger
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The Serpent's ShadowBookQuoters 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.
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