Albert Camus Quotes
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One cannot be a part-time nihilist.
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Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
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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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Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
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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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Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.
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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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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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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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Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
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But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.
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When the body is sad, the heart languishes.
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Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
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The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
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You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
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Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.
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Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
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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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There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.
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In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
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May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!
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We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
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For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.
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Paris is dirty. It has pigeons and black yards. The people have white skin.