In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Biography
About Albert Camus
Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French-Algerian novelist, playwright, essayist, and philosopher who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. Born in poverty in colonial Algeria to a French father who died in World War I before Camus could know him, he was raised by an illiterate mother in Algiers. His major works — The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Rebel (1951) — articulate his philosophy of the Absurd: the confrontation between human desire for meaning and the universe's silence.
He died in a car accident at 46, at the height of his powers.
Key Themes
Quick Facts
- Born
- 1913
- Died
- 1960
- Lifespan
- 47 yrs
- Quotes
- 1 collected
Wisdom
Albert Camus's Famous Quotes
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
— Return to Tipasa (in L'Été / Summer), 1954
Camus wrote this essay when he returned to the Algerian ruins of Tipasa — a place of luminous beauty he had visited as a young man. At the time of writing, he was in the depths of a political and creative crisis, struggling with his position on Algerian independence and the limits of his own thought. Finding that "invincible summer" within himself was not metaphor but documentary: the discovery that an inner resource of joy had survived everything winter had done to him.
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Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French-Algerian novelist, playwright, essayist, and philosopher who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. Born in poverty in colonial Algeria to a French father who died in World War I before Camus could know him, he was raised by an illiterate mother in Algiers. His major works — The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Rebel (1951) — articulate his philosophy of the Absurd: the confrontation between human desire for meaning and the universe's silence. He died in a car accident at 46, at the height of his powers. The Nobel committee praised him for illuminating "the problems of the human conscience in our times." Albert Camus lived 1913 – 1960.
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