"I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world."
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Quote collection
Albert Camus quotes (page 18 of 50)
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"To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows."
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"Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them."
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"To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes."
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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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"By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more."
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"On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art."
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"Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion."
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"In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all."
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"You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about."
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"The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge."
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"The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love."
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"Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments."
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"I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms."
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"In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary."
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"As for those whose role it is to love us - I mean, relatives and in-laws (what a word)- It's a different tune. They find the right word, but it's usually the one that wounds."
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"Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified."
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"Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see."
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"To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate"
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"The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically , expresses an aspiration for order ."
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