“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
“A dictator decrees,” she later wrote, “a president asks Congress for permission to organize.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“Grab my hands and stop me, because if you don’t, you’re mine. And I’m yours, and whatever else happens, we’ll have something beautiful and perfect, and it’ll mean something, for as long as it lasts.”
― Jasinda Wilder, quote from Falling Under
“I clung to him while, overhead, the clouds burst forth a final brilliant streak of golden red, as if the gates of heaven themselves had briefly opened, and closed again. My trembling stilled; the wind seemed to fall silent, and some weight I didn't fully understand, a melancholy ages old, was lifted from my sobbing chest and drifted like an answered prayer into the darkness.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Splendour Falls
“En un mundo que prefiere la seguridad a la justicia, hay cada vez más gente que aplaude el sacrificio de la justicia en los altares de la seguridad. En las calles de las ciudades, se celebran las ceremonias. Cada vez que un delincuente cae acribillado, la sociedad siente alivio ante la enfermedad que la acosa. La muerte de cada malviviente surte efectos farmacéuticos sobre los bienvivientes. La palabra farmacia viene de phármakos, que era el nombre que daban los griegos a las víctimas humanas de los sacrificios ofrendados a los dioses en tiempos de crisis.”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World
“You call me your sun, well you’re my moon, Kaeleb. I know it’s not the most romantic thing I could say right now, but it’s true. You’re my balance. You’re the ebb to my flow. You’re the day to my night. The light to my dark. With all the bad that I’ve experienced, you are the good that balances my life.”
― L.B. Simmons, quote from The Resurrection of Aubrey Miller
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.