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Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

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
Virtue
Implacable
Impossible
Guillotine
Republic
Forgiveness
Absolutes
Absolute
Leads
Logic

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To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless.
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I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
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I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.
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It is immoral not to tell.
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If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
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Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.
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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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... 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.
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But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
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Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
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We are not certain, we are never certain.
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How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.
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Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
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The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
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You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us
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Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
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A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.
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Do you believe in God, doctor? No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.
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We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.
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