Albert Camus

Idleness is only fatal to the mediocre.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence — they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.

I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine.

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Fate is not in man but around him.

Of course, I had to own that he was right; I didn't feel much regret for what I'd done. Still, to my mind, he overdid it, and I'd have liked to have a chance of explaining to him, in a quite friendly, almost affectionate way, that I have never been able to really regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.

He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.