The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

by Albert Camus

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

Love this sentence.

T HERE 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.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.

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.

But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.

Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table.

The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation.

Does the Absurd dictate death?

Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue.

At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

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

No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.

For by asserting that all is true we assert the truth of the contrary assertion and consequently the falsity of our own thesis

The very simplicity of these paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.

Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.

With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge.

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me.

Socrates’ “Know thyself” has as much value as the “Be virtuous” of our confessionals.

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?

That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh.

But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.

Jaspers despairs of any ontology because he claims that we have lost “naiveté.” He knows that we can achieve nothing that will transcend the fatal game of appearances.

I want everything to be explained to me or nothing.

What I fail to understand is nonsense. The world is peopled with such irrationals.

The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational.

The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently dictated.

the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison.

A single certainty is enough for the seeker. He simply has to derive all the consequences from it.

There can be no absurd outside the human mind.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future. That is natural.

But it is just as natural that he should strive to escape the universe of which he is the creator.

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

The important thing, as Abbé Galiani said to Mme d’Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.

Since nothing is proved, everything can be proved.

I am told again that here the intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down.

From the abstract god of Husserl to the dazzling god of Kierkegaard the distance is not so great. Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching.

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope.

Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme.

In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death.

The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself.

(others are so sure of being free, and that cheerful mood is so contagious!).

Thus the absurd man realizes that he was not really free.

A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate.

“Prayer,” says Alain, “is when night descends over thought.”

M Y FIELD,” said Goethe, “is time.”

What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal.