Born poor in Mondovi, Algeria, writer Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a philosophy student and leftist journalist. He was active with the French Resistance of World War II and had a close association with existentialist John-Paul Sartre.

"If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one," he once said.

Living at a time of great world turbulence, Camus was best known for his short novel, L'etranger (1941, The Stranger) in which he passionately tried to find the meaning of life and examined man's search for values in the world. Through absurdity, he sought to make sense of the chaos.

"The absurd is sin without God," he observed.

In 1957, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times."

Camus, who died in an auto crash, once said, "Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely."

More Albert CAMUS Quotations

Find harmony and you will find happiness.