Albert Camus Quotes
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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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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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I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.
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Art and revolt will die only with the last man.
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There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.
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The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
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What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.
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Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
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There are more things to admire in men than to despise.
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The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
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The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
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To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.
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No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
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The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.
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No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.
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People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
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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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He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
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Peace is the only battle worth waging.
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The one who doesnt play, doesnt win anything, but he actually looses somehting, playing.
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Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.
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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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Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.
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The act of love . . . is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.