Gå til hovedinnhold

The Myth of Sisyphus

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Albert Camus is talking about the existence of good and the absence of meaning. The goal is to rebel against the existentialist.

🎨 Impressions

Weird and I did not understand much. Must read it again when I am more philosophically mature.

How I Discovered It​

I wanted to know more about Camus and I read the stranger.

Who Should Read It?​

If you have deep thoughts about the meaning of the

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I don't understand anything.

✍️ My Top Quotes

  • There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

  • what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

  • There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection.

  • This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

  • “Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?” That existence which, suddenly and through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as “the unthinkable

  • “Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?” That existence which, suddenly and through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as “the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.”

  • Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

  • “If we could contemplate clearly the exact laws of psychic processes, they would be seen to be likewise eternal and invariable, like the basic laws of theoretical natural science. Hence they would be valid even if there were no psychic process.”

  • The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all its meaning.

  • “Prayer,” says Alain, “is when night descends over thought.”

  • Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgment but his own. A greater life cannot mean for him another life.

  • I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.

  • The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. “Everything is permitted” does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions.

  • All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.

  • Explanation is useless, but the sensation remains and, with it, the constant attractions of a universe inexhaustible in quantity. The place of the work of art can be understood at this point.

  • Likewise, the whole effort of this conqueror will be diverted to ambition, which was but a way toward a greater life.

  • “If God does not exist, I am god.” To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.

  • Above all, of course, it is drawing all the inferences from that painful independence. If God exists, all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us.

  • Speaking of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote: “The chief question that will be pursued throughout this book is the very one from which I have suffered consciously or unconsciously all life long: the existence of God.”

  • Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.

  • The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.

  • The loves we share with a city are often secret loves. Old walled towns like Paris, Prague, and even Florence are closed in on themselves and hence limit the world that belongs to them.

  • Not that they have read the boring sermons of the nudists, those Protestants of the flesh (there

  • The mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite different from the tragedy of fogs.

  • Greek thought always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred nor reason, because it negated nothing, neither the sacred nor reason. It took everything

  • “I hate my time,” Saint-Exupery wrote shortly before his death,

  • The Marxists and their followers likewise think they are humanists. But for them human nature will be formed in the classless society of the future. To begin with, this proves that they reject at the present moment what we all are: those humanists are accusers of man.

  • They reject the man of today in the name of the man of the future. That claim is religious in nature. Why should it be more justified than the one which announces the kingdom of heaven to come?

  • I have heard of an emulator of Peregrinos, a post-war writer who, after having finished his first hook, committed suicide to attract attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but the book was judged no good.

  • “Stavrogin: ‘Do you believe in eternal life in the other world?’ Kirilov: ‘No, but in eternal life in this world.’ “Man

  • “Stavrogin: ‘Do you believe in eternal life in the other world?’ Kirilov: ‘No, but in eternal life in this world.’”

  • “Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment.”