The Myths Of Sisyphus Quotes

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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion." [The Minotaur]
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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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.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Existence is illusory and it is eternal.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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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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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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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.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.
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Albert Camus
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Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The loves we share with a city are often secret loves.
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Albert Camus (Summer in Algiers)
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It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm โ€“ this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the โ€œwhyโ€ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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Ce qu'on appelle une raison de vivre est en mรชme temps une excellente raison de mourir.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: โ€œtomorrow,โ€ โ€œlater on,โ€ โ€œwhen you have made your way,โ€ โ€œyou will understand when you are old enough.โ€ Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, itโ€™s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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There is so much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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As in all religions, man is freed of the weight of his own life.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves the stronger the absurd grows.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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Iโ€™m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Crรฉer, c'est vivre deux fois.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Although โ€œThe Myth of Sisyphusโ€ poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankindโ€™s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.
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Stephen Fry (Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1))
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there are truths but no truth
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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They deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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If one could only say just once: 'this is clear', all would be saved
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Likewise the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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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?
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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La lutte elle-mรชme vers les sommets suffit ร  remplir un cล“ur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. (Le Mythe de Sisyphe)
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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There's no worse punishment than worthless, hopeless labor.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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Even men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not fall asleep on theirs either.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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One of the centuryโ€™s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: โ€œThere is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
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William Styron (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)
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I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter, these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Not that one must be an animal, but I find no meaning in the happiness of angels. I know simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after my death?
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferencesโ€”all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge...[Reason] is an instrument of thought and not thought itself. Above all, a man's thought is his nostalgia.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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To will is to stir up paradoxes
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Anche la lotta verso la cima basta a riempire il cuore di un uomo. Bisogna immaginare Sisifo felice.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men 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?
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Was [Sisyphus] from your province? 'I don't know. I don't know if he's real,' Ky says. 'If he ever existed.' 'Then why tell his story?' I don't understand, and for a second I feel betrayed. Why did Ky tell me about this person and make me feel empathy for him when there's no proof that he ever lived at all? Ky pauses for a moment before he answers, ...'Even if he didn't live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it's true anyway.
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Ally Condie (Matched (Matched, #1))
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And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the ruleโ€” of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my light.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardor and that illumination. Forsaking beauty and the sensual happiness attached to it, exclusively serving misfortune, calls for a nobility I lack. But, after all, nothing is true that forces one to exclude.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot rejectโ€”this is what counts. I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I donโ€™t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists meโ€”that is what I understand. And these two certaintiesโ€”my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principleโ€”I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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A day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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For three years,โ€™ says Kirilov, โ€˜I sought the attribute of my divinity and I have found it. The attribute of my divinity is independence.โ€™ Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilovโ€™s premiss: โ€˜If God does not exist, I am god.โ€™ To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart - that is where it must be sought.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he can have a master. The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all its meaning. For in the presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the alternative: either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the acuteness of this paradox.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of the pen
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Je laisse Sisyphe au bas de la montagne ! On retrouve toujours son fardeau. Mais Sisyphe enseigne la fidรฉlitรฉ supรฉrieure qui nie les dieux et soulรจve les rochers. Lui aussi juge que tout est bien. Cet univers dรฉsormais sans maรฎtre ne lui paraรฎt ni stรฉrile ni fertile. Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque รฉclat minรฉral de cette montagne pleine de nuit, ร  lui seul, forme un monde. La lutte elle-mรชme vers les sommets suffit ร  remplir un cล“ur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: โ€œWhat would life be?โ€ one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaardโ€™s reply: โ€œdespair.โ€ Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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Heaven and earth. Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up by ruling over a desert. What imagination could we have left for that higher equilibrium in which nature balanced history, beauty, virtue, and which applied the music of numbers even to blood-tragedy? We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printerโ€™s ink.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of "personal sorrows" or of "incurable illness." These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension. But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering. What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
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Albert Camus
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I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I donโ€™t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
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Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-colored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
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Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)