Albert Camus Quotes

I used to dream of being other places, other people. It was an escape for me.

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

True life is elsewhere

The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

It's true, I don't like the real world.

What one hopes for is always better than what one has.

There's always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.

None are happy but by anticipation of change.

If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in? That village, that city, that life? We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.

But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?

No one is contented in this world, I believe. There is always something left to desire, and the last thing longed for always seems the most necessary to happiness.

happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.

But even in her laughter there was something missing. She never seemed to be truly happy; she just seemed to be passing time while she waited for something else. She was tired of just existing; she wanted to live.

I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

Lots of people think things would be better some other way. That's why the world's lousy with theme parks.

I hoped my absence made them happy or at least made them forget that they weren't happy and never will be.

The ox longs for the gaudy trappings of the horse; the lazy pack-horse would fain plough. [We envy the position of others, dissatisfied with our own.]

It's not what isn't, it's what you wish was that makes unhappiness.

And yet ... But what if ... I want to do something impossible. Something astounding and unheard of. I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect.

No one is ever satisfied where he is.

I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day, and to have the hope of knowing the happiness of that glorious world above the stars.