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But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

Albert Camus

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Albert Camus
Age: 46 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 7
Died: 1960
Died: January 4
Author
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French Resistance Fighter
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
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Drean
Camus
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Schoolteacher
Time
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Dare
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Make
Making
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Men

More quotes by Albert Camus

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In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.
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How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?
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Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.
Albert Camus
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A fate is not a punishment.
Albert Camus
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The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.
Albert Camus
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I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.
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The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
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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.
Albert Camus
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Marxism is not scientific: at the best, it has scientific prejudices.
Albert Camus
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The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
Albert Camus
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Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus
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A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
Albert Camus
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I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
Albert Camus
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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Albert Camus
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... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.
Albert Camus
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A true masterpiece does not tell everything.
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
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I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.
Albert Camus
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What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
Albert Camus
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I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.
Albert Camus