Quote

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
Essayist
French Resistance Fighter
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
Writer
Drean
Camus
Wells
Knowing
Punished
Well
Four
Calculations
Make
Whether
Reward
Men
Making
Punishment
Time
History
Rewards
Schoolteacher
Comes
Dare
Attends
Death
Aware
Calculation
Two
Question
Dares

More quotes by Albert Camus

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Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
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The truth, as the light, makes blind.
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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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After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
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Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
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The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.
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I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.
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It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.
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Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.
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Life is a sum of all your choices. So, what are you doing today?
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They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
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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.
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At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.
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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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A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
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I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored
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Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
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Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
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One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
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