All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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.
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
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.
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
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.
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
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 – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
In a universe suddenly divested of illusion 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.
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
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.
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that 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 I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
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