Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

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There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always 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 forever bound to it.

Albert Camus
The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.

Albert Camus
From Pandora's Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.

Albert Camus
The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.

Albert Camus
Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.

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

Albert Camus
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

Albert Camus
The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.

Albert Camus
For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

Albert Camus
It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.

Albert Camus
People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.

Albert Camus
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

Albert Camus
We know, and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance... allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life.

Albert Camus
A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.

Albert Camus
Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences-all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.

Albert Camus
In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.

Albert Camus
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.

Albert Camus
For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.

Albert Camus