Albert Camus Quotes
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I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.
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He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
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In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.
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Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
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I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
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I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
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All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
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Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
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At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
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What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
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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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Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.
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Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
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For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.
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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.
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It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'
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Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
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I rebel - therefore we exist.
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To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate.
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I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey.
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Mon cher ami, let's not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!!! Otherwise, we'll be left in shreds. We are forced to take the same precautions as the animal trainer. If, before going into the cage, he has the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild animals!!
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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.