The Myth of Sisyphus - By Albert Camus

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 An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps.

Is there a logic to the point of death?

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

In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

I want everything to be explained to me or nothing.

Absurd' means 'It's impossible' but also: 'It's contradictory'. If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine-guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd.
But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and , the aim he has in view.

A man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from .them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future. That is natural. But

What need would we have of God? We tum towards God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.

Above all, a man's thought is his nostalgia.

Suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived.
It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.

either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all-powerful.

There are those who are made for living and those who are made for loving.

Beware of those who say: "I know this too well to be able to express it." For if they cannot do so, this is because they don't know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.

At the end of all that, despite everything, is death.

The idea of an art detached from its creator is not only outmoded; it is false.

To think is first of all to create a world

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 labour.

Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.

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.

This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile.
Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time.

These are difficult rites but ones that simplify everything. Good and evil, winner and loser.
At Corinth two temples stood side by side, the temple of Violence and the temple of Necessity.
We shall fight for the virtue that has a history. What virtue? The horses of Patroclus weep for their master killed in battle.
All is lost. But the fight resumes with Achilles and victory is the outcome, because friendship has just been assassinated: friendship is a virtue.

In a certain sense, the direction history will take is not the one we think. It lies in the struggle between creation and inquisition.

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.

Considered as artists, we perhaps have no need to interfere in the affairs of the world. But considered as men, yes.

By itself art could probably not produce the renaissance which implies justice and liberty.
But without it, that renaissance would be without forms, and consequently, would be nothing. 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.