camus

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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You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness
consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of
life.
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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Man is the only creature who 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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Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
Albert Camus
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Live to the point of tears.
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, The Fall
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There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
Albert Camus
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Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
Albert Camus
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The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely
free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Albert Camus
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Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
Albert Camus
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To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
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An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone
whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both
halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?"
This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise
intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.
Albert Camus
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Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus
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The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Albert Camus
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At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
Albert Camus
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Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
Albert Camus
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I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was
absolutely sure about what didn't.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
Albert Camus, L'Etranger
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Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
Albert Camus
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I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.
Albert Camus, The Fall
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When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
Albert Camus, The First Man
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Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth
Albert Camus
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I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, theres something stronger  something better, pushing right back.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
Albert Camus, The Plague
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I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
Albert Camus
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Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
Albert Camus, The Fall
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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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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
Albert Camus
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I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.
Albert Camus, L'Etranger
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Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. 
Albert Camus
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What is a rebel? A man who says no.
Albert Camus
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You can't create experience, you undergo it.
Albert Camus
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Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
Albert Camus
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She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth.  A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth.
Albert Camus
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There is not love of life without despair about life.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
Albert Camus
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Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus
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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.
Albert Camus
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Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
Albert Camus
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We are all special cases.
Albert Camus
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Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
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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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Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai decouvert en moi un invincible ete.
Albert Camus
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Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus
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And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
Albert Camus, The Plague
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Peace is the only battle worth waging.
Albert Camus
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A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
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If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Camus
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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.
Albert Camus, The Fall
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The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus
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I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
Albert Camus, The Plague
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Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Albert Camus
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There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
Albert Camus
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The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus
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Nothing in life is worth,
turning your back on,
if you love it.
Albert Camus
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Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the peoples anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble  yes, gamble  with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.
Albert Camus
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I rebel; therefore I exist.
Albert Camus
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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.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.
Albert Camus
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The need to be right - the sign of a vulgar mind.
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. All the rest  whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories  comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
Albert Camus
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A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
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Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!
Albert Camus, The Fall
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I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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For 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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Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
Albert Camus
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Don't lies eventually lead to the truth?  And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion?  Don't they all have the same meaning?  So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am?  Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth.  Truth, like light, blinds.  Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Albert Camus, The Fall
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Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
Albert Camus
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The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
Albert Camus, The Plague
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Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
Albert Camus
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Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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Integrity has no need of rules.
Albert Camus
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He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
Albert Camus
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I had been right  I was still right  I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn t done that. I hadn t done this thing and I had done another. And so? 
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration.  Something desperate, you know.
Albert Camus, A Happy Death
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If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.
Albert Camus
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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.
Albert Camus
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What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
Albert Camus
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Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.
Albert Camus, L'Etranger
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My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that...
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, theres something stronger  something better, pushing right back.

Truly yours,
Albert Camus
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
Albert Camus
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Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
Albert Camus
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What I'm sure of is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain 'superior beings' who think that money isn't necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly.... For a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That's the only problem that's ever interested me.... To have money is to have time. That's my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.... Everything for happiness, against the world which surrounds us with its violence and its stupidity.... All the cruelty of our civilization can be measured by this one axiom: happy nations have no history.
Albert Camus
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I love life - thats my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
Albert Camus, The Fall
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We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.
Albert Camus
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...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
Albert Camus
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I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
Albert Camus
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After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Albert Camus
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But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.  Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine.  What interests me is being a man.
Albert Camus, The Plague
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Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Albert Camus
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Art and revolt will die only with the last man.
Albert Camus
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Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.  But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others.  Consequently, there is no escape.  Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.
Albert Camus, The Fall
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There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
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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And never have I felt so deeply
at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
Albert Camus
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I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
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My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.
Albert Camus
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We are all born mad, some remain so
Albert Camus
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I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.  But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
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A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his
longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this
confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of
the world.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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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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They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
Albert Camus, The Plague
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You always get exaggerated notions about things you don't know anything about.
Albert Camus
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If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
Albert Camus
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