“What a temptation to identify oneself with those stones, to melt into that burning and impassive universe that defies history and its ferments! That is doubtless futile. But there is in every man a profound instinct which is neither that of destruction nor that of creation. It is merely a matter of resembling nothing.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“There the world began over again every day in an ever new light. O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Oh, to be nothing!” For thousands of years this great cry has roused millions of men to revolt against desire and pain. Its dying echoes have reached this far, across centuries and oceans, to the oldest sea in the world.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Flowers, tears (if you insist), departures, and struggles are for tomorrow.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“O mornings in the country of Oran! From the high plateaus the swallows plunge into huge troughs where the air is seething. The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“It is Christianity that began substituting the tragedy of the soul for contemplation of the world. But, at least, Christianity referred to a spiritual nature and thereby preserved a certain fixity. With God dead, there remains only history and power.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and you now inhabit a foreign land.
—Medea”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But the summer city herself had been emptied of her laughter and offered me only bent and shining backs. In the evening, in the crudely lighted cafes where I took refuge, I read my age in faces I recognized without being able to name them. I merely knew that they had been young with me and that they were no longer so.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Yet I persisted without very well knowing what I was waiting for, unless perhaps the moment to go back to Tipasa.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I hoped, I think, to recapture there a freedom I could not forget. In that spot, indeed, more than twenty years ago, I had spent whole mornings wandering among the ruins, breathing in the wormwood, warming myself against the stones, discovering little roses, soon plucked of their petals, which outlive the spring.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays