“Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.”
The Plague (1947)
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Albert Camus 209
French author and journalist 1913–1960Related quotes

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[In the Company of the Holy Mother, 66-67]

Hagakure (c. 1716)
Context: Although all things are not to be judged in this manner, I mention it in the investigation of the Way of the Samurai. When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your inquiring beforehand, there is most often shame. Reading books and listening to people's talk are for the purpose of prior resolution.
Above all, the Way of the Samurai should be in being aware that you do not know what is going to happen next, and in querying every item day and night. Victory and defeat are matters of the temporary force of circumstances.
“One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all.”
Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 6

“One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.”
1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990)
“We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Statement from his final address, during a conference on East-West monastic dialogue, delivered just two hours before his death (10 December 1968), quoted in Religious Education, Vol. 73 (1978), p. 292, and in The Boundless Circle : Caring for Creatures and Creation (1996) by Michael W. Fox.