The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

by Albert Camus

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example,

truism.

But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning?

When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world as a unity,

And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure.

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? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay. The important thing is to find out how people get away in the first case and why people stay in the second case. This is how I define the problem of suicide and the possible interest in the conclusions of existential philosophy.

If I judge that a thing is true, I must preserve it. If I attempt to solve a problem, at least I must not by that very solution conjure away one of the terms of the problem.

A commentator relates a remark of his that deserves interest: “The only true solution,” he said, “is precisely where human judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.”