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Albert Camus

French writer who portrayed the human condition as isolated in an absurd world (1913-1960)

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A person I knew use to divide human beings into three categories Those who prefer 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.

– Albert Camus

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Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

– Albert Camus

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Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

– Albert Camus

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Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.

– Albert Camus

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I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

– Albert Camus

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Live to the point of tears.

– Albert Camus

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But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.

– Albert Camus

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Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

– Albert Camus

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Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.

– Albert Camus

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Don't walk behind me I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

– Albert Camus

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Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

– Albert Camus

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The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence cynicism.

– Albert Camus

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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

– Albert Camus

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Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

– Albert Camus

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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.

– Albert Camus

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'It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.

– Albert Camus

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In the depth of winter, I learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

– Albert Camus

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In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.

– Albert Camus

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He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.

– Albert Camus

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The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.

– Albert Camus

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A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

– Albert Camus

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We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

– Albert Camus

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What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

– Albert Camus

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I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

– Albert Camus

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An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself.

– Albert Camus

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In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

– Albert Camus

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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

– Albert Camus

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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

– Albert Camus

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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

– Albert Camus

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By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

– Albert Camus

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Danger makes men classical, and all greatness, after all, is rooted in risk.

– Albert Camus

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Every insubordinate person, when he rises up against oppression, reaffirms thereby the solidarity of all men.

– Albert Camus

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Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

– Albert Camus

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Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.

– Albert Camus

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Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship--never.

– Albert Camus

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Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

– Albert Camus

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History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

– Albert Camus

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How many crimes are committed simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.

– Albert Camus

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I love my country too much to be a nationalist.

– Albert Camus

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I rebel - therefore we exist.

– Albert Camus

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I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.

– Albert Camus

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I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man he fornicated and read the papers.

– Albert Camus

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If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.

– Albert Camus

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If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

– Albert Camus

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If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

– Albert Camus

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In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

– Albert Camus

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In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.

– Albert Camus

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Integrity has no need of rules.

– Albert Camus

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It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

– Albert Camus

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It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.

– Albert Camus

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It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

– Albert Camus

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Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

– Albert Camus

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Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

– Albert Camus

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Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you dont help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

– Albert Camus

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Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to what is present.

– Albert Camus

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Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

– Albert Camus

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Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

– Albert Camus

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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. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.

– Albert Camus

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The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country.

– Albert Camus

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The need to be right -- the sign of a vulgar mind.

– Albert Camus

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The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.

– Albert Camus

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The truth, as the light, makes blind.

– Albert Camus

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The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

– Albert Camus

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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem...

– Albert Camus

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There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

– Albert Camus

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To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

– Albert Camus

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Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

– Albert Camus

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Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

– Albert Camus

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We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

– Albert Camus

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What is a rebel A man who says no.

– Albert Camus

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Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

– Albert Camus

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You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

– Albert Camus

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You know what charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

– Albert Camus

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