Albert Camus Quotes
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Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
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Find your happiness in yourself.
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Peace is the only battle worth waging.
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Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
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What doesn't kill you make you stronger and stronger.
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Humans are creatures, who spent their lifes trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd.
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The truth, as the light, makes blind.
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The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
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Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. (This quotation is from Notebook IV in Notebooks: 1942-1951, not Myth of Sisyphus. The quotation appears in none of Camus books you find in bookstores).
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In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
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Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.
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Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.
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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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We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
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We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.
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Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
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The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
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Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
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There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.
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The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting.
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Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
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'In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time.'