The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

by Albert Camus

On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.

that a man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us.

If one could only say just once: “This is clear,” all would be saved.

“the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.”

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.”

The moment the notion transforms itself into eternity’s springboard, it ceases to be linked to human lucidity.

To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

In truth the way matters but little; the will to arrive suffices.

Sin is not so much knowing (if it were, everybody would be innocent) as wanting to know.

I don’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.

Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty.

That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.

The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance.

Knowing whether or not man is free doesn’t interest me. I can experience only my own freedom.

What freedom can exist in the fullest sense without assurance of eternity?

The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.

The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity.

And that is indeed genius: the intelligence that knows its frontiers.

There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.

A mind foolish enough to prefer a comedy to eternity has lost its salvation.

Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories.

This world has a higher meaning that transcends its worries, or nothing is true but those worries.

One must live with time and die with it, or else elude it for a greater life.

“Yes, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life.

If the term “wise man” can be applied to the man who lives on what he has without speculating on what he has not, then they are wise men.

And in the end, the great artist under this climate is, above all, a great living being, it being understood that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

Expression begins where thought ends.

Under another aspect the same is true for music. If any art is devoid of lessons, it is certainly music. It is too closely related to mathematics not to have borrowed their gratuitousness. That game the mind plays with itself according to set and measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass that belongs to us and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in an inhuman universe. There is no purer sensation. These examples are too easy. The absurd man recognizes as his own these harmonies and these forms.

The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains. The number of bad novels must not make us forget the value of the best.

The great novelists are philosophical novelists—that is, the contrary of thesis-writers. For instance, Balzac, Sade, Melville, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Proust, Malraux, Kafka, to cite but a few.

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.

All is well, everything is permitted, and nothing is hateful—these are absurd judgments.

“If faith in immortality is so necessary to the human being (that without it he comes to the point of killing himself), it must therefore be the normal state of humanity. Since this is the case, the immortality of the human soul exists without any doubt.”

existence is illusory and it is eternal.

Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

But if I know that, if I can even admire it, I also know that I am not seeking what is universal, but what is true. The two may well not coincide.

And all insist on that paltry eternity provided us cheaply by the hearts of those who loved us.

And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after my death?

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

But moving things about is the work of men; one must choose doing that or nothing.

But there is in every man a profound instinct which is neither that of destruction nor that of creation. It is merely a matter of resembling nothing.

With God dead, there remains only history and power.

To be sure, it is sheer madness, almost always punished, to return to the sites of one’s youth and try to relive at forty what one loved or keenly enjoyed at twenty.