Albert Camus Quotes
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In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
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It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
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What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?
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Without work all life goes rotten.
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The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.
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An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
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True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.
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Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.
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People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.
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Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
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Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses.
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Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
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There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.
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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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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
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We all have a weakness for beauty.
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The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
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The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.
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There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.
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There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.
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You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
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For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
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It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
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Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.