Albert Camus Quotes
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But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.
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He was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way.
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Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.
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An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
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If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.
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No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.
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We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.
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I was tormented by my desire for a woman ... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.
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The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
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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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Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
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Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
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In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
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From Pandora's Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.
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... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.
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It is better to burn than to disappear.
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Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
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The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
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The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.
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If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
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History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
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One cannot be a part-time nihilist.
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Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.