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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.
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A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
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You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
From A Happy Death
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Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.
From The Stranger
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It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.
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The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
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Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
From A Happy Death
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Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
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The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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To will is to stir up paradoxes
From The Myth of Sisyphus
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No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.
From Notebooks 1935-1942
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A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.
From Lyrical and Critical Essays
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It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
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In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.
From The Plague
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For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.
From The Stranger
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Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.
From The Plague
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And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
From The Stranger
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Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.
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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.
From The Stranger
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Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
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A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
From The Fall
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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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
From A Happy Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
From A Happy Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To will is to stir up paradoxes
From The Myth of Sisyphus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.
From Notebooks 1935-1942
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.
From Lyrical and Critical Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.
From The Plague
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.
From The Plague
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
From The Fall
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
From A Happy Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
From A Happy Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To will is to stir up paradoxes
From The Myth of Sisyphus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.
From Notebooks 1935-1942
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.
From Lyrical and Critical Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.
From The Plague
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.
From The Plague
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
From The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
From The Fall
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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