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
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Popular quotes

“fear of death.” Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.”
― Sigmund Freud, quote from Totem and Taboo


“Her spine was steel. Her heart was armor. Her eyes were fire.”
― Kiersten White, quote from And I Darken


“I’m tougher than nails. I could still kick your pony-lovin’ butt with twice this pain.” Thomas shrugged. “I do love ponies. Wish I could eat one right now.” His stomach grumbled and gurgled.”
― James Dashner, quote from The Maze Runner Series


“Our reason tries in vain to show them to us; we refuse to see them till we find them in the way of our interests." Prince”
― Andrew Lang, quote from The Blue Fairy Book


“It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Juliet, Naked


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