“Let me repeat. None of all this has any real meaning. On the way to that liberty, there is still a progress to be made.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“How I need you,” Frieda says to K. “How forsaken I feel, since knowing you, when you are not with me.” This subtle remedy that makes us love what crushes us and makes hope spring up in a world without issue, this sudden “leap” through which everything is changed, is the secret of the existential revolution and of The Castle itself.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays