"There is no love of life without despair of life."
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Albert Camus quotes (page 21 of 50)
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"When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives."
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"The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves."
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"Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death."
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"I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am."
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"... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this."
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"I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy."
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"Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult."
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"There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness."
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"One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself."
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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."
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"The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art"
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"Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it."
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"Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening's slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon."
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"We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so."
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"Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable."
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"We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot."
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"We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us."
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"How hard it is, how bitter it is to become a man!"
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"Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world."
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