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Capital Punishment Is The Most Premeditated Of Murders, To Which No Criminal's Deed, However Calculated Can Be Compared. For There To Be An Equivalency, The Death Penalty Would Have To Punish A Criminal Who Had Warned His Victim Of The Date At Which He Would Inflict A Horrible Death On Him And Who, From That Moment Onward, Had Confined Him At His Mercy For Months. Such A Monster Is Not Encountered In Private Life.

-Albert Camus

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Capital Punishment Is The

Albert Camus

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Capital Punishment Is The Most Premeditated Of Murders, To Which No Criminal's Deed, However Calculated Can Be Compared. For There To Be An Equivalency, The Death Penalty Would Have To Punish A Criminal Who Had Warned His Victim Of The Date At Which He Would Inflict A Horrible Death On Him And Who, From That Moment Onward, Had Confined Him At His Mercy For Months. Such A Monster Is Not Encountered In Private Life.

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Peace Is The Only Battle Worth Waging.

He Had Been Bored, That's All, Bored Like Most People. Hence He Had Made Himself Out Of Whole Cloth A Life Full Of Complications And Drama. Something Must Happen - And That Explains Most Human Commitments. Something Must Happen, Even Loveless Slavery, Even War Or Death. Hurray Then For Funerals!

Always Go Too Far, Because That's Where You'll Find The Truth

We Must Learn How To Lend Ourselves To Dreaming When Dreams Lend Themselves To Us.

It's A Kind Of Spiritual Snobbery That Makes People Think They Can Be Happy Without Money.

He Was Conscious Of The Disastrous Fact That Love And Desire Must Be Expressed In The Same Way.

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy.

If God Did Not Exist, We Should Have To Invent Him. If God Did Exist, We Should Have To Abolish Him.

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.

To Know Oneself, One Should Assert Oneself.

What Is Human In Me Is Not What Is Best In Me. What Is Human In Me Is That I Desire, And To Obtain What I Desire, I Believe I Would Crush Anything That Stood In My Way.

Everything Considered, A Determined Soul Will Always Manage.

It Is Not Your Paintings I Like, It Is Your Painting.

The Only Way To Deal With An Unfree World Is To Become So Absolutely Free That Your Very Existence Is An Act Of Rebellion.

Human Rebellion Ends In Metaphysical Revolution. It Progresses From Appearances To Acts, From The Dandy To The Revolutionary.

We Are Not Certain, We Are Never Certain. If We Were We Could Reach Some Conclusions, And We Could, At Last, Make Others Take Us Seriously.

The Temptation Shared By All Forms Of Intelligence: Cynicism.

To Abandon Oneself To Principles Is Really To Die - And To Die For An Impossible Love Which Is The Contrary Of Love.

I Conceived At Least One Great Love In My Life, Of Which I Was Always The Object.

This Is The Century Of Fear.

Like Great Works, Deep Feelings Always Mean More Than They Are Conscious Of Saying.

Believe Me, Religions Are On The Wrong Track The Moment They Moralize And Fulminate Commandments. God Is Not Needed To Create Guilt Or To Punish. Our Fellow Men Suffice, Aided By Ourselves.

A Work Of Art Is A Confession.

Liberty Is Dangerous, As Hard To Get Along With As It Is Exciting.

Just As All Thought, And Primarily That Of Non-signification, Signifies Something, So There Is No Art That Has No Signification.

Meaning Of Life

Life Has No Meaning

Likewise And During Every Day Of An Unillustrious Life, Time Carries Us. But A Moment Always Comes When We Have To Carry It.

For Those Of Us Who Have Been Thrown Into Hell, Mysterious Melodies And The Torturing Images Of A Vanished Beauty Will Always Bring Us, In The Midst Of Crime And Folly, The Echo Of That Harmonious Insurrection Which Bears Witness, Throughout The Centuries, To The Greatness Of Humanity.

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.

I Felt The Urge To Reassure Him That I Was Like Everybody Else, Just Like Everybody Else.

Yes, There Was An Element Of Abstraction And Unreality In Misfortune. But When An Abstraction Starts To Kill You, You Have To Get To Work On It.

To Lose One's Life Is No Great Matter; When The Time Comes I'll Have The Courage To Lose Mine. But What's Intolerable Is To See One's Life Being Drained Of Meaning, To Be Told There's No Reason For Existing. A Man Can't Live Without Some Reason For Living.

We Get Into The Habit Of Living Before Acquiring The Habit Of Thinking.

I Am Too Much In Love With My Lies And Hypocrisies Not To Confess Them Fervently.

He Knew Now That It Was His Own Will To Happiness Which Must Make The Next Move. But If He Was To Do So, He Realized That He Must Come To Terms With Time, That To Have Time Was At Once The Most Magnificent And The Most Dangerous Of Experiments. Idleness Is Fatal Only To The Mediocre.

And Real Nobility (that Of The Heart) Is Based On Scorn, Courage, And Profound Indifference.

I Was Born Poor And Without Religion, Under A Happy Sky, Feeling Harmony, Not Hostility, In Nature. I Began Not By Feeling Torn, But In Plenitude.

There Are Always Reasons For Murdering A Man. But There Is No Justification For His Existence.

Happiness Is Generous. It Does Not Subsist On Destruction.

I Feel More Fellowship With The Defeated Than With Saints.

The Absurd Hero's Refusal To Hope Becomes His Singular Ability To Live In The Present With Passion.

Live In The Present

If Nothing Had Any Meaning, You Would Be Right. But There Is Something That Still Has A Meaning.

Meaning Of Life

His Own Faith, However, Was Not Lacking In Virtues Since It Consisted In Acknowledging Obscurely That He Would Be Granted Much Without Ever Deserving Anything.

I Would Like To Be Able To Breathe— To Be Able To Love Her By Memory Or Fidelity. But My Heart Aches. I Love You Continuously, Intensely.

The Need To Be Right Is The Sign Of A Vulgar Mind.

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When The Body Is Sad, The Heart Languishes.

Empires And Churches Are Born Under The Sun Of Death.

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...the Play Of The Toughest And Most Lucid Mind Are At The Same Time Both Lavished Andsquandered.

Yes, I'm Happy, In Human Terms.

The Act Of Love Is A Confession.

In Order To Exist, Man Must Rebel, But Rebellion Must Respect The Limits That It Discovers In Itself - Limits Where Minds Meet, And In Meeting, Begin To Exist.

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People Hasten To Judge In Order Not To Be Judged Themselves.

Still, Obviously, One Can't Be Sensible All The Time.

Men Who Have Greatness Within Them Don't Go In For Politics.

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Makes You Stronger

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It Is Easier To Kill What We Do Not Know.

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God Put Self-pity By The Side Of Despair Like The Cure By The Side Of The Disease.

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Precious Stones

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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.

He Was Expressing His Certainty That My Appeal Would Be Granted, But I Was Carrying The Burden Of A Sin From Which I Had To Free Myself. According To Him, Human Justice Was Nothing And Divine Justice Was Everything. I Pointed Out It Was The Former That Had Condemned Me.

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.

I Had Only A Little Time Left And I Didn't Want To Waste It On God.

The Loss Of Love Is The Loss Of All Rights, Even Though One Had Them All.

Men And Women Consume One Another Rapidly In What Is Called "the Act Of Love," Or Else Settle Down To A Mild Habit Of Conjugality. We Seldom Find A Mean Between These Two Extremes.

In The Midst Of Winter, I Found There Was, Within Me, An Invincible Summer. And That Makes Me Happy. For It Says That No Matter How Hard The World Pushes Against Me, Within Me, There’s Something Stronger – Something Better, Pushing Right Back.

It Is Not Humiliating To Be Unhappy. Physical Suffering Is Sometimes Humiliating, But The Suffering Of Being Cannot Be, It Is Life.

Happiness And Love

You Have So Much Inside You, And The Noblest Happiness Of All. Don’t Just Wait For A Man To Come Along. That’s The Mistake So Many Women Make. Find Your Happiness In Yourself.

We [raymond And Meursault] Stared At Each Other Without Blinking, And Everything Came To A Stop There Between The Sea, The Sand, And The Sun, And The Double Silence Of The Flute And The Water. It Was Then That I Realized That You Could Either Shoot Or Not Shoot.

What Is A Rebel? A Man Who Says No: But Whose Refusal Does Not Imply A Renunciation.

It's Not The Struggle That Makes Us Artists, But Art That Makes Us Struggle.

In Fact, Other People Create For Lack Of Power. I, On The Other Hand, Do Not Need A Work: I Live.

There Are Causes Worth Dying For, But None Worth Killing For.

Death Means Nothing To Men Like Me. It's The Event That Proves Them Right.

A Taste For Truth At Any Cost Is A Passion Which Spares Nothing.

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.

One Leader, One People, Signifies One Master And Millions Of Slaves.

In Order To Understand The World, One Has To Turn Away From It On Occasion.

Everyone Would Like To Behave Like A Pagan, With Everyone Else Behaving Like A Christian.

It Is Not The World That Is Absurd, Nor Human Thought: The Absurd Arises When The Human Need To Understand Meets The Unreasonableness Of The World, When 'my Appetite For The Absolute And For Unity' Meets 'the Impossibility Of Reducing This World To A Rational And Reasonable Principle.'

We're All Special Cases.

A Stranger To Myself And To The World, Armed Solely With A Thought That Negates Itself As Soon As It Asserts, What Is This Condition In Which I Can Have Peace Only By Refusing To Know And To Live, In Which The Appetite For Conquest Bumps Into Walls That Defy Its Assaults?

When I Look At My Life And Its Secret Colors, I Feel Like Bursting Into Tears.

I've Never Really Had Much Of An Imagination. But Still I Would Try To Picture The Exact Moment When The Beating Of My Heart Would No Longer Be Going On Inside My Head.

In Order To Understand The World, One Has To Turn Away From It On Occasion; In Order To Serve Others Better, One Has To Hold Them At A Distance For A Time. But Where Can One Find The Solitude Necessary To Vigor, The Deep Breath In Which The Mind Collects Itself And Courage Gauges Its Strength? There Remain Big Cities.

From The Moment Absurdity Is Recognized, It Becomes A Passion, The Most Harrowing Of All. But Whether Or Not One Can Live With One's Passions, Whether Or Not One Can Accept Their Law, Which Is To Burn The Heart They Simultaneously Exalt - That Is The Whole Question.

There Always Comes A Time When One Must Choose Between Contemplation And Action. This Is Called Becoming A Man.

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?

To Lose The Touch Of Flowers And Women's Hands Is The Supreme Separation.

To Two Men Living The Same Number Of Years, The World Always Provides The Same Sum Of Experiences. It Is Up To Us To Be Conscious Of Them.

All I Maintain Is That On This Earth There Are Pestilences And There Are Victims, And It's Up To Us, So Far As Possible, Not To Join Forces With The Pestilences. That May Sound Simple To The Point Of Childishness; I Can't Judge If It's Simple, But I Know It's True.

It Takes Time To Live. Like Any Work Of Art, Life Needs To Be Thought About.

There Is But One Freedom, To Put Oneself Right With Death. After That Everything Is Possible.

No, Father, I've A Very Different Idea Of Love. And Until My Dying Day I Shall Refuse To Love A Scheme Of Things In Which Children Are Put To Torture.

Men Die And They Are Not Happy.

But Too Many People Now Climb Onto The Cross Merely To Be Seen From A Greater Distance, Even If They Have To Trample Somewhat On The One Who Has Been There So Long.

But Do You Know Why We Are Always More Just And Generous Toward The Dead? The Reason Is Simple. With Them There Is No Obligation. They Leave Us Free And We Can Take Our Time, Fit The Testimonial Between A Cocktail Party And A Nice Little Mistress, In Our Spare Time, In Short.

... Man Has An Idea Of A Better World Than This. But Better Does Not Mean Different, It Means Unified... Religion Or Crime, Every Human Endeavor In Fact, Finally Obeys This Unreasonabledesire And Claims To Give Life A Form It Does Not Have.

Life Continues, And Some Mornings, Weary Of The Noise, Discouraged By The Prospect Of The Interminable Work To Keep After, Sickened Also By The Madness Of The World That Leaps At You From The Newspaper, Finally Convinced That I Will Not Be Equal To It And That I Will Disappoint Everyone - All I Want To Do Is Sit Down And Wait For Evening. This Is What I Feel Like, And Sometimes I Yield To It.

Even When One Sits In The Prisoner's Dock, It Is Interesting To Hear Talk About Oneself.

One Cannot Be A Part-time Nihilist.

It Is Immoral Not To Tell.

True Artists Scorn Nothing.

Beginning To Think Is Beginning To Be Undermined.

The Poor Man Whom Everyone Speaks Of, The Poor Man Whom Everyone Pities, One Of The Repulsive Poor From Whom Charitable Souls Keep Their Distance, He Has Still Said Nothing. Or, Rather, He Has Spoken Through The Voice Of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At Least, They Said So. And These Shameful Impostures Fed Their Authors. Cruel Irony, The Poor Man Tormented With Hunger Feeds Those Who Plead His Case.

No Doubt Our Love Was Still There, But Quite Simply It Was Unusable, Heavy To Carry, Inert Inside Of Us, Sterile As Crime Or Condemnation. It Was No Longer Anything Except A Patience With No Future And A Stubborn Wait.

Only The Sea, Murmurous Behind The Dingy Checkerboard Of Houses, Told Of The Unrest, The Precariousness, Of All Things In This World.

A Single Sentence Will Suffice For Modern Man. He Fornicated And Read The Papers. After That Vigorous Definition, The Subject Will Be, If I May Say So, Exhausted.

Existence Is Illusory And It Is Eternal.

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.

Man Wants To Live, But It Is Useless To Hope That This Desire Will Dictate All His Actions.

In Italian Museums Are Sometimes Found Little Painted Screens That The Priest Used To Hold In Front Of The Face Of Condemned Men To Hide The Scaffold From Them.

At That Time, I Often Thought That If I Had Had To Live In The Trunk Of A Dead Tree, With Nothing To Do But Look Up At The Sky Flowing Overhead, Little By Little I Would Have Gotten Used To It.

If You Keep On Excusing, You Eventually Give Your Blessing To The Slave Camp, To Cowardly Force, To Organized Executioners, To The Cynicism Of Great Political Monsters; You Finally Hand Over Your Brothers.

Why Should It Be Essential To Love Rarely In Order To Love Much?

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.

On Good Days, If You Trust Life, Life Has To Answer You.

Mistakes Are Joyful, Truth Infernal.

I Looked Up At The Mass Of Signs And Stars In The Night Sky And Laid Myself Open For The First Time To The Benign Indifference Of The World.

To Live Is To Hurt Others, And Through Others, To Hurt Oneself. Cruel Earth! How Can We Manage Not To Touch Anything? To Find What Ultimate Exile?

In A World That Has Ceased To Believe In Sin, The Artist Is Responsible For The Preaching.

Old Married People Look So Much Alike That They Have The Same Number Of Hairs In Their Ears.

I Would Rather Live My Life As If There Is A God And Die To Find Out There Isn't, Than Live As If There Isn't And To Die To Find Out That There Is.

If There Is A God

I Know Myself Too Well To Believe In Pure Virtue.

The World Expects Of Christians That They Will Raise Their Voices So Loudly And Clearly And So Formulate Their Protest That Not Even The Simplest Man Can Have The Slightest Doubt About What They Are Saying. Further, The World Expects Of Christians That They Will Eschew All Fuzzy Abstractions And Plant Themselves Squarely In Front Of The Bloody Face Of History. We Stand In Need Of Folk Who Have Determined To Speak Directly And Unmistakably And Come What May, To Stand By What They Have Said.

In Our Society, Any Man Who Doesn't Cry At His Mother's Funeral Is Liable To Be Condemned To Death.

Love Cannot Accept What It Is. Everywhere On Earth It Cries Out Against Kindness, Compassion, Intelligence, Everything That Leads To Compromise. Love Demands The Impossible, The Absolute, The Sky On Fire, Inexhaustible Springtime, Life After Death, And Death Itself Transfigured Into Eternal Life.

History Has Shown That The Less People Read, The More Books They Buy.

I Grew Up With The Sea, And Poverty For Me Was Sumptuous; Then I Lost The Sea And Found All Luxuries Gray And Poverty Unbearable.

On My Way Out I Was Even Going To Shake His Hand, But I Remembered Just In Time That I'd Killed A Man.

The Most Exhausting Effort In My Life Has Been To Suppress My Own Nature In Order To Make It Serve My Biggest Plans.

To Be Happy, We Must Not Be Too Concerned With Others.

Find Your Happiness In Yourself.

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.

Truth Is Not A Virtue, But A Passion. It Is Never Charitable.

The Future Is The Only Kind Of Property That The Masters Willingly Concede To The Slaves.

To Insure The Adoration Of A Theorem For Any Length Of Time, Faith Is Not Enough, A Police Force Is Needed As Well.

Law Enforcement

To Cut Short This Question Of The Law Of Retaliation, We Must Note That Even In Its Primitive Form It Can Operate Only Between Two Individuals Of Whom One Is Absolutely Innocent And The Other Absolutely Guilty. The Victim, To Be Sure, Is Innocent. But Can The Society That Is Supposed To Represent The Victim Lay Claim To Innocence?

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.

The Struggle Itself Towards The Heights Is Enough To Fill A Man's Heart. One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy.

What The World Requires Of The Christians Is That They Should Continue To Be Christians.

Je Puis Nier Une Chose Sans Me Croire Obligé De La Salir Ou De Retirer Aux Autres Le Droit D'y Croire.

If We Believe In Nothing, If Nothing Has Any Meaning And If We Can Affirm No Values Whatsoever, Then Everything Is Possible And Nothing Has Any Importance.

It Was Previously A Question Of Finding Out Whether Or Not Life Had To Have A Meaning To Be Lived. It Now Becomes Clear On The Contrary That It Will Be Lived All The Better If It Has No Meaning

Outside Of That Single Fatality Of Death, Everything, Joy Or Happiness, Is Liberty.

Blessed Are The Hearts That Can Bend; They Shall Never Be Broken.

A Profound Thought Is In A Constant State Of Becoming; It Adopts The Experience Of A Life And Assumes Its Shape.

Psychology Is Action, Not Thinking About Oneself.

Working Conditions For Me Have Always Been Those Of The Monastic Life: Solitude And Frugality. Except For Frugality, They Are Contrary To My Nature, So Much So That Work Is A Violence I Do To Myself.

Working Conditions

A Sub-clerk In The Post-office Is The Equal Of A Conqueror If Consciousness Is Common To Them.

That Is Love, To Give Away Everything, To Sacrifice Everything, Without The Slightest Desire To Get Anything In Return.3

The Absurd Is Essentially A Divorce. It Lies In Neither Of The Elements Compared; It Is Born Of Their Confrontation.

All Men Have A Sweetness In Their Life. That Is What Helps Them Go On. It Is Towards That They Turn When They Feel Too Worn Out.

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.

Some Are Created To Love, While The Others - To Live.

There Are Means That Cannot Be Excused. And I Should Like To Be Able To Love My Country And Still Love Justice. I Don't Want Just Any Greatness For It, Particularly A Greatness Born Of Blood And Falsehood. I Want To Keep It Alive By Keeping Justice Alive.

Being Is Good, But Getting Rich Is Better.... If The Gods Had Only The Riches Of Men's Adoration, They Would Be As Poor As Poor Caligula.

A Symbol Always Transcends The One Who Makes Use Of It And Makes Him Say In Reality More Than He Is Aware Of Expressing.

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