Quote

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

Albert Camus

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Albert Camus
Age: 46 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 7
Died: 1960
Died: January 4
Author
Essayist
French Resistance Fighter
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
Writer
Drean
Camus
Since
Smoke
Broadcast
Actually
Million
Existentialism
War
Hundred
Puff
History
Unless
Deaths
Men
Dead
Corpses
Millions
Served
Imagination
Hardly
Seen
Substance

More quotes by Albert Camus

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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.
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Big tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because of all the wrinkles, they weren't dripping off. They spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film over his ruined face.
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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
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There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
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On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.
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I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.
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If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.
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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.
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Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
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Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.
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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 purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
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There is no more futile punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
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O light! This the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.
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One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.
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Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.
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But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.
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And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.
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Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.
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