Albert Camus quotes, followed by various quotes about autumn
I found these when Googling the 'invincible summer' quote (see below), as part of my contemplating the remaining 'Fall Back Into Sherlock' prompts.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
- Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa (1952), as translated in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968)
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
- Albert Camus
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
Albert Camus, La Chute (The Fall),1956
I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.
Albert Camus
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert Camus
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Albert Camus
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Albert Camus
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Albert Camus
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
Albert Camus
Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.
Albert Camus, Caligula
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
Albert Camus, Happy Death
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
Albert Camus, L'Homme revolte (The Rebel), 1951
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951)
other quotes (autumnal)
These are as they appear in The Book of Uncommon Quips and Quotations by Venkata Ramana.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn.
- John Muir
All nature speaks the voice of dissolution. The highway of history and of life is strewn with the wrecks that Time, the great despoiler, has made. We listen sorrowfully to the autumn winds as they sigh through dismantled forests, but we know their breath will be soft and vernal in the spring, and the dead flowers and withered foliage will blossom and bloom again. And if a man dies, shall he too, not live again?
- Daniel Wolsey
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because time is short. Civilisation is another word for respect for life.
- Elizabeth Goudge
For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
- Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America
The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him too.
- Hal Borland
other seasonal quotes
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's sob'rer time.
Thomas Moore, Spring and Autumn
In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects as from August to November.
Rose G. Kingsley, The Autumn Garden
Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
John Keats, Ode to Autumn
Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
Stanley Horowitz
My sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Robert Frost, My November Guest.
I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
E. E. Cummings
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay.
O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Autumn's the mellow time.
William Allingham
If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
Mitchell Burgess, From TV series Northern Exposure, Thanksgiving, 1992.
Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.
Carol Bishop Hipps
Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
Emily Dickinson
October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came -
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.
George Cooper, October's Party
Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh.
October is a symphony of permanence and change.
Bonaro W. Overstreet
Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hole, telling how it pass'd
O'er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent Summer dealt.
William Allingham, Autumnal Sonnet.
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou mayest rest
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
William Blake, To Autumn.
Autumn wins you best by this, its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Robert Browning
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
William Cullen Bryant, The Third of November
The mellow autumn came, and with it came
The promised party, to enjoy its sweets.
The corn is cut, the manor full of game;
The pointer ranges, and the sportsman beats
In russet jacket;--lynx-like is his aim;
Full grows his bag, and wonderful his feats.
An, nutbrown partridges! An, brilliant pheasants!
And ah, ye poachers!--'Tis no sport for peasants.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Yellow, mellow, ripened days,
Sheltered in a golden coating;
O'er the dreamy, listless haze,
White and dainty cloudlets floating;
Winking at the blushing trees,
And the sombre, furrowed fallow;
Smiling at the airy ease,
Of the southward flying swallow
Sweet and smiling are thy ways,
Beauteous, golden Autumn days.
Will Carleton, Autumn Days
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;--
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.
Thomas Hood, Ode - Autumn
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
Johnny Mercer, Autumn Leaves. Originally a French song Les Feuilles Mortes with lyrics by poet Jacques Prevért.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
- Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa (1952), as translated in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968)
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
- Albert Camus
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
Albert Camus, La Chute (The Fall),1956
I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.
Albert Camus
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert Camus
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Albert Camus
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Albert Camus
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Albert Camus
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
Albert Camus
Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.
Albert Camus, Caligula
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
Albert Camus, Happy Death
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
Albert Camus, L'Homme revolte (The Rebel), 1951
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951)
other quotes (autumnal)
These are as they appear in The Book of Uncommon Quips and Quotations by Venkata Ramana.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn.
- John Muir
All nature speaks the voice of dissolution. The highway of history and of life is strewn with the wrecks that Time, the great despoiler, has made. We listen sorrowfully to the autumn winds as they sigh through dismantled forests, but we know their breath will be soft and vernal in the spring, and the dead flowers and withered foliage will blossom and bloom again. And if a man dies, shall he too, not live again?
- Daniel Wolsey
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because time is short. Civilisation is another word for respect for life.
- Elizabeth Goudge
For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
- Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America
The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him too.
- Hal Borland
other seasonal quotes
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's sob'rer time.
Thomas Moore, Spring and Autumn
In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects as from August to November.
Rose G. Kingsley, The Autumn Garden
Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
John Keats, Ode to Autumn
Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
Stanley Horowitz
My sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Robert Frost, My November Guest.
I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
E. E. Cummings
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay.
O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Autumn's the mellow time.
William Allingham
If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
Mitchell Burgess, From TV series Northern Exposure, Thanksgiving, 1992.
Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.
Carol Bishop Hipps
Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
Emily Dickinson
October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came -
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.
George Cooper, October's Party
Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh.
October is a symphony of permanence and change.
Bonaro W. Overstreet
Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hole, telling how it pass'd
O'er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent Summer dealt.
William Allingham, Autumnal Sonnet.
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou mayest rest
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
William Blake, To Autumn.
Autumn wins you best by this, its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Robert Browning
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
William Cullen Bryant, The Third of November
The mellow autumn came, and with it came
The promised party, to enjoy its sweets.
The corn is cut, the manor full of game;
The pointer ranges, and the sportsman beats
In russet jacket;--lynx-like is his aim;
Full grows his bag, and wonderful his feats.
An, nutbrown partridges! An, brilliant pheasants!
And ah, ye poachers!--'Tis no sport for peasants.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Yellow, mellow, ripened days,
Sheltered in a golden coating;
O'er the dreamy, listless haze,
White and dainty cloudlets floating;
Winking at the blushing trees,
And the sombre, furrowed fallow;
Smiling at the airy ease,
Of the southward flying swallow
Sweet and smiling are thy ways,
Beauteous, golden Autumn days.
Will Carleton, Autumn Days
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;--
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.
Thomas Hood, Ode - Autumn
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
Johnny Mercer, Autumn Leaves. Originally a French song Les Feuilles Mortes with lyrics by poet Jacques Prevért.