Albert Camus Quotes

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

I contemplate the idea that maybe I'm an alcoholic. I get this occassionally, the need to define myself as something-or-the-other, and at various times in my life have wondered if I'm a Goth, a homosexul, a Jew, a Catholic or a manic depressive, whether I am adopted, or have a hole in my heart, or possess the ability to move objects with the power of my mind, and have always, most regretfully, come to the conclusion that I'm none of the above. The fact is I'm actually not ANYTHING.

You can spend time self-identifying and figuring out what you are on that, but at some point, you just want to be who you are and not walk around telling people.

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.

I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves?

If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they'd get along OK, but they'd both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”

I think this is what college is all about: self-examination and dealing with those questions of "Who am I?"

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

There are times when I worry that I've already lost myself. That is, that my self is so inseparable from being with you that if we were to separate, I would no longer be. I save this thought for when I feel the darkest discontent. I never meant to depend so much on someone else.

Who ARE You?" This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

Every decision you make ... is a decision about Who You Are.

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

Sometimes you can get so far in yourself that you don't know who you are.

When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don't know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.

I don't know how much of a natural human I am. Y'know, the truth is, I never set out to do that, and I don't think of myself like that. I don't think like that. It's not really about promotion - I don't really understand the idea of promotion, talking to a camera for more money. That's just money. And I like money, don't get me wrong. I don't know. I don't get it. I don't understand it as much as you don't understand me, I think.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.

She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.