Albert Camus Quotes
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I knew a pure heart who refused tot be mistrustful.... He had written at his doorstep: "From wherever you are, enter and be welcome". Who do you think responded to this lovely invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and gutted him.
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To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
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It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
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But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.
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Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless.
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The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
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The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.
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The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
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Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.
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I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
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The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
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I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
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Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
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To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
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Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.
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We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.
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If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.
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In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.
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We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
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Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
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One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
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Having money is a way of being free of money.