Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.
For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
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.
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. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
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.
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
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.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
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.
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
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
...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.
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?
The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
With useless endeavour Forever, forever, Is Sisyphus rolling His stone up the mountain!
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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