Albert Camus Quotes
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Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it's meaningless.
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…there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.
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When there is no hope, one must invent hope.
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Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
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None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
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... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.
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What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.
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The truth, as the light, makes blind.
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A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
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It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
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In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.
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A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
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Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
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Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.
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Aujourd'hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
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The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
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With rebellion, awareness is born.
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Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.
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The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
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Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
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I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.
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A work of art is a confession.
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No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.
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There are more things to admire in men than to despise.