12 Albert Camus Quotes on Happiness

Albert Camus quotes on happiness

15. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

54. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

64. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.

65. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. 'What! - by such narrow ways - ?' There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness.

67. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

89. To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

102. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and best of a life are devoted to earning that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

115. But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

158. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn.

163. It is not much to be able to do violence when you have been simply preparing for it for years and when violence is more natural to you than thinking. It is a great deal, on the other hand, to face torture and death when you know for a fact that hatred and violence are empty things in themselves. It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.

228. To come alive again, one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland. Certain mornings, on turning a corner, a delightful dew falls on the heart and then evaporates. But its coolness remains, and this is what the heart requires always. I had to set out again.

249. You will never be happy if you keep searching for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you keep looking for the meaning of life without living it.