Albert Camus Quotes
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To cut short this question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?
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I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?
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Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
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There is not love of life without despair about life.
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When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
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Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
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It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
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There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
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The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.
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She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
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'What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?''I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps.''Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?' 'Comprehension.'
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There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
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After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace. "Yes, he replied. "The path of sympathy.
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L'homme enfin n'est pas entièrement coupable - il n'a pas commencé l'histoire - ni tout à fait innocent, puisqu'il la continue.
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Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
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There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.
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Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.
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History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
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The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.
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How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!
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I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.
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The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.
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There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.
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If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.