The Aphorisms of Albert Camus
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
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There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
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The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
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The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
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The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
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The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
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The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
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Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
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Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
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In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
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In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
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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.
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But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.
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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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Integrity has no need of rules.
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Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
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You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.
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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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Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
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Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
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When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
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What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
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We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
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We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
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We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
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We are all special cases.
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Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
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Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
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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.
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Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
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To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
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To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
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To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
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To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
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To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
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To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
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Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
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Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
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There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
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The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
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The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
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The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
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The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.
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The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
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The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
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The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
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The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
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That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
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Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
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Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
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Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
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Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
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Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds - a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.
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Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
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One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
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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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Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
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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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Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.
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Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
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Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
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Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
(( 8 ))
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It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
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It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
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In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
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If there is sin against life, it consists... in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
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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.
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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.
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How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
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Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
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For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
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Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
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Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
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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.
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Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
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Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
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By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
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Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
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At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
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At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
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As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
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Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
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Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
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After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
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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.
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Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
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