"You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade."
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Quote collection
Albert Camus quotes (page 11 of 50)
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"Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night."
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"But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself."
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"Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children."
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"In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible."
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"Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths."
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"Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss"
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"More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure."
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"There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between."
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"A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted."
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"A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to 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."
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"We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves."
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"What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation."
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"...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves."
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"All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out."
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"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
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"Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences."
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"Tout re volutionnaire finit en oppresseur ou en he re tique. Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic."
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"The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition."
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"We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty."
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