Albert Camus · 212 pages
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“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. 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. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. 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.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Ce qu'on appelle une raison de vivre est en même temps une excellente raison de mourir.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what 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 which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Albert Camus
Born place: in Mondovi, Algeria
Born date November 7, 1913
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“compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting—of leaving ourselves—hundreds of times a day.”
― Geneen Roth, quote from Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
“For the question of abortion, perhaps the most significant passage of all is found in the specific laws God gave Moses for the people of Israel during the time of the Mosaic covenant. One particular law spoke of the penalties to be imposed in case the life or health of a pregnant woman or her preborn child was endangered or harmed: When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exod. 21:22–25).1 This law concerns a situation when men are fighting and one of them accidentally hits a pregnant woman. Neither one of them intended to do this, but as they fought they were not careful enough to avoid hitting her. If that happens, there are two possibilities: 1. If this causes a premature birth but there is no harm to the pregnant woman or her preborn child, there is still a penalty: “The one who hit her shall surely be fined” (v. 22). The penalty was for carelessly endangering the life or health of the pregnant woman and her child. We have similar laws in modern society, such as when a person is fined for drunken driving, even though he has hit no one with his car. He recklessly endangered human life and health, and he deserved a fine or other penalty. 2. But “if there is harm” to either the pregnant woman or her child, then the penalties are quite severe: “Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth …” (vv. 23–24). This means that both the mother and the preborn child are given equal legal protection. The penalty for harming the preborn child is just as great as for harming the mother. Both are treated as persons, and both deserve the full protection of the law.2”
― Wayne A. Grudem, quote from Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture
“There is one final bad-news punch line to my life. This bad news is complicated, difficult to explain. In a nutshell, it’s that I am pretty sure that my dad is planning to kill me. The good news is that he’d be doing this out of his love for me. The bad news is that whatever the wonderfulness of his motives, I’ll be dead.”
― Terry Trueman, quote from Stuck in Neutral
“You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”
― Max Ehrmann, quote from Desiderata: Words For Life
“Tevekkül Allah'a! Köpeğin efendisi varsa kurdun da Tanrı'sı vardır.”
― Chingiz Aitmatov, quote from The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
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