Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
Interpretation
True happiness is found in the freedom of living, as everything else is just a fleeting experience.
In this quote, Albert Camus suggests that the only inevitable aspect of life is death, and everything else, including joy and happiness, is intertwined with the concept of liberty. Happiness is not merely about pleasant experiences; it is about the freedom to live authentically and fully, recognizing that even in the face of mortality, our experiences of joy are valuable and shaped by our freedom.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing life, one might quote Camus to highlight the importance of appreciating freedom.
The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.
At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.
I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.
Self-sacrifice, not self-assertion, is the law of the highest universe.
The devil's most devilish when respectable.
Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade. We see it in the suffering of civilian populations trapped by armed conflict or pervasive crime. We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians - including children, the most vulnerable of all.
The United States was founded on the idea that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, and that principle has allowed us to work to perfect our union at home while standing as a beacon of hope to the world. Today, that principle is embodied in agreements Americans helped forge - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and treaties against torture and genocide - and it unites us with people from every country and culture.
She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.
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