Albert Camus Quotes
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The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
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Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
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I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.
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There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
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The look of success, when it is worn a certain way, would infuriate a jackass.
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More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.
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I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb's admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist's.
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... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonabledesire and claims to give life a form it does not have.
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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
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It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
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Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.
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Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.
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No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.
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A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
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There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.
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Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.
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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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The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.
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Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.