John > John's Quotes

“People aren’t always what you want them to be. Sometimes they disappoint you or let you down, but you have to give them a chance first. You can’t just meet someone and expect them to be everything you’re looking for and then be angry when they’re not every hope and aspiration you projected onto them. It’s foolish to believe that someone will be what you imagine them to be. And sometimes, when you give them a chance, they turn out to be better than you imagined. Different, but better.”
― Chloe Rattray, Sacré Noir

“Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. ”
― Albert Camus

“We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.”
― Albert Camus

“Life is a sum of all your choices".

So, what are you doing today?”
― Albert Camus

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience”
― Albert Camus

“What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”
― Albert Camus

“He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe”
― Albert Camus

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful”
― Albert Camus

“There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“When the time to die comes, it does not matter how and when it happens.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.”
― Albert Camus

“If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves the stronger the absurd grows.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“We are created to live side by side. However, we only die for ourselves.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-1951

“We must live and let live in order to create what we are.”
― Albert Camus