Kylee > Kylee's Quotes

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Young women looking after a children's summer camp, the ice-cream vendor's horn (his cart is a gondola on wheels, pushed by two handles), the displays of fruit, red melons with black pips, translucent, sticky grapes -- all are props for the person who can no longer be alone. [1] But the cicadas' tender and bitter chirping, the perfume of water and stars one meets on September nights, the scented paths among the lentisks and the rosebushes, all these are signs of love for the person forced to be alone. [2]

[1] That is to say, everybody.
[2] That is to say, everybody.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in daily fidelity.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“A writer writes to a great extent to be read (let's admire those who say they don't, but not believe them).”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Here I understand what is meant by glory: the right to love without limits.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“None of this fits together? How very true! A woman you leave behind to go to the movies, an old man to whom you have stopped listening, a death that redeems nothing, and then, on the other hand, the whole radiance of the world. What difference does it make if you accept everything? Here are three destinies, different and yet alike. Death for us all, but his own death to each. After all, the sun still warms our bones for us.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“To correct a natural indifference, I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Dear friends, don't be afraid of life! How good is life when one does something good and just!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from Earth but to set up Heaven on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I want to be there when every one suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built by this longing, and I am a believer.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“He who loves men, loves their joy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars ...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of space, and "he was not ashamed of that ecstasy." There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over "in contact with other worlds." He longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and for everything. "And others are praying for me too," echoed again in his soul. But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind -- and it was for all his life and for ever and ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, his life long, could Alyosha forget that minute.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Autumnal -- nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth -- reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“It would have been nice to have had unicorns.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing