Best Myth Of Sisyphus Quotes

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.

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.

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.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

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.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

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 the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.

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

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. 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 toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man’s heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

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.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

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.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

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

There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.

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.

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.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.