Albert Camus Quotes
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I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.
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In order to exist, man must rebel.
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And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
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Find your happiness in yourself.
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In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
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But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.
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We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.
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Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
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I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.
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Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
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No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
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The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
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Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
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Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. (This quotation is from Notebook IV in Notebooks: 1942-1951, not Myth of Sisyphus. The quotation appears in none of Camus books you find in bookstores).
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Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
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Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
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That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.
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There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.
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I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
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Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
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Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
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No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
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Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
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What doesn't kill you make you stronger and stronger.