Albert Camus Quotes

In that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.

You've gotta blow the roof off of your heart and let the universe in.

Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song?

Every time we open our hearts, we create the space for a global alternative.

Bears are made of the same dust as we, and they breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters. A bear's days are warmed by the same sun, his dwellings are overdomed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and ebbs with heart pulsing like ours. He was poured from the same first fountain. And whether he at last goes to our stingy Heaven or not, he has terrestrial immortality. His life, not long, not short, knows no beginning , no ending. To him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the accidents of time, and his years, markless and boundless, equal eternity.

When life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

I think tension between the intimate and the vast is at the heart of every poem by any poet, though of course the terms with which it is explored vary. Perhaps it is something we seek out in order to affirm that our small lives are tethered to something large and ongoing.

Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experience.

I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love. And it's necessary to accept the one in order to love the other.

Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.

If you allow spirit to have dominion in your heart you will have dominion in your life. That changes thinking. That IS the miracle. That I'm not just a child of the body, I'm a child of the universe and in the universe I am programmed for greatness, and the fact that I don't have money in my bank account now doesn't mean I'm any less programmed for greatness. I was programmed for greatness just like the acorn is programmed to be an oak tree.

Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.

Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart. (Old Doll)

The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.

I feel like the actual, the most beautiful thing about a song is that it is something that goes out there in the universe and people use it in the way that they need it in their lives.

The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act.

And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.

(existing's tricky:but to live's a gift)

Religion is not any particular teaching. Religion is everywhere.

The human condition itself inspires me.