Albert Camus Quotes - Page 27

• …. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.

  Albert Camus

  Sunday, Waiting Rooms, Office

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Plague”, p.26, Vintage

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• Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.

  Albert Camus

  War, Boredom, Slavery

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• No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.

  Albert Camus

  Destiny, Emotion, Individual

  Albert Camus (1960). “The plague: translated from the French”

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• One cannot be a part-time nihilist.

  Albert Camus

  Nihilism, Nihilist, Part Time

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• There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.

  Albert Camus

  Country, Mean, Greatness

  Albert Camus (2012). “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays”, p.5, Vintage

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

  Albert Camus

  Inspirational, Science, Technology

  Albert Camus (1963). “Notebooks”

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• A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

  Albert Camus

  Writing, Character, May

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.37, Vintage

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• Why must one love rarely to love well?

  Albert Camus

  One Love, Wells

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• There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

  Albert Camus

  Art, Ends, Insight

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• For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

  Albert Camus

  Greatness, Echoes, Humanity

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.276, Vintage

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• Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.

  Albert Camus

  Freedom, Ideas, Liberty

  Albert Camus (2012). “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays”, p.102, Vintage

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• Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.

  Albert Camus

  Lying, Men, Decision

  Albert Camus (2007). “Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947”, p.18, Princeton University Press

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• Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

  Albert Camus

  Sea, House, Unrest

  Albert Camus (1960). “The plague: translated from the French”

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• I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

  Albert Camus

  Beach, Wind, Waiting

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• A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Absurd, Conscious

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.31, Vintage

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• On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Hands, Way

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• ...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Liberty, Want

  Albert Camus (2016). “The Stranger”, p.51, Hamilton Books

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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

  Relationship, Positive, Future

  Albert Camus (1963). “Carnets: 1942-1951”

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• If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

  Albert Camus

  Nature, Real, Blood

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.44, Vintage

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• Murder is terribly exhausting.

  Albert Camus

  Murder, Exhausting

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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

  Lonely, Stars, Philosophy

  L'Etranger (The Stranger) pt. 2, ch. 5 (1942)

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• Beware of those who say: "I know this too well to be able to express it." For if they cannot do so, this is because they don't know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.

  Albert Camus

  Atheism, Laziness, Able

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• For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Matter, Indifference

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.94, Vintage

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• Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

  Albert Camus

  Solitude, Violence, Working Conditions

  Albert Camus, Jean Grenier (2003). “Correspondence, 1932-1960”, p.195, U of Nebraska Press

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• maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occured to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. [...] Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.

  Albert Camus

  Girlfriend, Tired, Men

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