Albert Camus Quotes
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I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.
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Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.
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This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
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I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
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... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.
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I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.
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I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
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Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak.
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It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.
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We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.
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I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
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A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.
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God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.
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As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
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Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone ... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.
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Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
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You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.
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My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.
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On certain mornings, as we turn a corner, an exquisite dew falls on our heart and then vanishes. But the freshness lingers, and this, always, is what the heart needs. The earth must have risen in just such a light the morning the world was born.
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Many artists, even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!
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The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
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Indeed, men never know how to love. nothing satisfies them. All they know is to dream, to imagine new duties, to look for new countries and new homes. While we women, we know that we must hasten to love, to share the same bed, hold hands, and fear absence. When we women love, we dream of nothing.
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Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
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Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.