Albert Camus Quotes
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One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.
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And then came human beings; humans wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.
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From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.
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I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
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'Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.'
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Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. 'No artist tolerates reality,' says Nietzsche.
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Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.
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If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.
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Il me restait peu de temps. Je ne voulais pas le perdre avec Dieu.
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Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.
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Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.
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When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
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History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
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The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.
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In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.
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Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.
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We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
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Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
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We Raymond and Meursault stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.
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O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.
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I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.
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'In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time.'
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... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.
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The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.