“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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“I didn't understand for a long time, but what attracted me to MtAoFC [Mastering the Art of French Cooking] was the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it. I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility.”
― Julie Powell, quote from Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living
“Mine," Shane said. "Move away."
HIS? Oh, I am so yours Shane Maxton.”
― Christine Zolendz, quote from Saving Grace
“It doesn't change that I still want him, I still want to be with him, I still feel like the fucking air has been sucked out of the room when he walks in and I still think about him all the time.”
― Ais, quote from The Interludes
“يسيطر عليها الإحساس بوجوب إثارة القلق وخلق جو من البؤس بسبب الشعور بالواجب، فهي تنتمي إلى الطبقة الوسطى المتعفنة. إنها هيلدا التي تنجح دائما في قول شيئ يثير الكآبة حالما تطأ قدمك عتبة البيت. إنها تفعل أي شيئ بطريقة سلبية، فإن صنعت كعكة لا تفكر بالكعكة، بل بكيفية توفير الزبد والبيض، وعندما نكون في السرير معا، كل ما تفكر فيه هو الخوف من إنجاب طفل....إنها من الأشخاص الذين تكمن موهبتهم ومتعتهم الأساسية في الحياة باستباق وقوع المصائب الصغيرة فقط لأنها لا تهتم بالكبيرة منها كالحروب والمجاعات والزلازل والأوبئة والثورات، فكل ما يهمها هو أسعار الزبدة المرتفعة وفواتير الغاز الضخمة وأحذية الأولاد البالية وماتبقى من أقساط... هذا الخوف راسخ في عقلها”
― George Orwell, quote from Coming Up for Air
“I can tell you that “Just cheer up” is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It’s pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to “just walk it off.” Some people don’t understand that for a lot of us, mental illness is a severe chemical imbalance rather just having “a case of the Mondays.” Those same well-meaning people will tell me that I’m keeping myself from recovering because I really “just need to cheer up and smile.” That’s when I consider chopping off their arms and then blaming them for not picking up their severed arms so they can take them to the hospital to get reattached.”
― Jenny Lawson, quote from Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
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Never Fade
The Diviners
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Incarceron
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.
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