Albert Camus Quotes
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A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.
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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.
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Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.
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If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.
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Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.
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They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
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For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.
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But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.
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After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.
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A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
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Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
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The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.
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Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.
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We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.
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The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.
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It is better to burn than to disappear.
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Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.
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We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.
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There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.