Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Albert Camus
Albert Camus -
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
108 Sourced Quotes
View all Albert Camus Quotes
Source
Report...
To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
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.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
"I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.
Albert Camus
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.
Albert Camus
1
2
3
4
5
Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Albert Camus
Creative Commons
Born:
November 7, 1913
Died:
January 4, 1960
(aged 46)
More about Albert Camus...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes