Albert Camus Quotes
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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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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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One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
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Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
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In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.
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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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Why must one love rarely to love well?
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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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When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. … there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.
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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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The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
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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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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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There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
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The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
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Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.
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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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Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death 'He is going to pay his debt to society,' but: 'They are going to cut off his head.' It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.
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…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
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Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
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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 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.