Browse 118 quotes about The Myth Of Sisyphus.
“But perhaps someday, when we are ready to die of exhaustion and ignorance, I shall be able to disown our garish tombs and go and stretch out in the valley, under the same light, and learn for the last time what I know.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“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
“One had had to put oneself right with the authorities of night: the day’s beauty was but a memory.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“No love without a little innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling down; nations and men were tearing at one another’s throats; our hands were soiled. Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without meaning to be: the mystery was increasing with our knowledge. This is why, O mockery, we were concerned with morality. Weak and disabled, I was dreaming of virtue! In the days of innocence I didn’t even know that morality existed. I knew it now, and I was not capable of living up to its standard.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardor and that illumination. Forsaking beauty and the sensual happiness attached to it, exclusively serving misfortune, calls for a nobility I lack.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Isolated beauty ends up simpering; solitary justice ends up oppressing.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“A day comes when, thanks to rigidity, nothing causes wonder any more, everything is known, and life is spent in beginning over again. These are the days of exile, of desiccated life, of dead souls.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“For me there is not a single one of those sixty-nine kilometers that is not filled with memories and sensations.”
“It seemed as if the morning were stabilized, the sun stopped for an incalculable moment. In this light and this silence, years of wrath and night melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself as if my heart, long stopped, were calmly beginning to beat again. And awake now, I recognized one by one the imperceptible sounds of which the silence was made up: the figured bass of the birds, the sea’s faint, brief sighs at the foot of the rocks, the vibration of the trees, the blind singing of the columns, the rustling of the wormwood plants, the furtive lizards. I heard that; I also listened to the happy torrents rising within me. It seemed to me that I had at last come to harbor, for a moment at least, and that henceforth that moment would be endless.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But soon after, the sun rose visibly a degree in the sky. A magpie preluded briefly, and at once, from all directions, birds’ songs burst out with energy, jubilation, joyful discordance, and infinite rapture. The day started up again. It was to carry me to evening.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it. In the clamor in which we live, love is impossible and justice does not suffice.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
“In the difficult hour we are living, what else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point? In everything I have done or said up to now, I seem to recognize these two forces, even when they work at cross-purposes.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I have not been able to disown the light into which I was born and yet I have not wanted to reject the servitudes of this time.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Occasionally, at the moment of the first star in the still bright sky, under a shower of shimmering light, I thought I knew. I did know, in truth. I still know, perhaps. But no one wants any of this secret; I don’t want any myself, doubtless; and I cannot stand apart from my people.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“In reality the end of history cannot have, within the limits of our condition, any definable significance. It can only be the object of a faith and of a new mystification. A mystification that today is no less great than the one that of old based colonial oppression on the necessity of saving the souls of infidels.”
“The man who has such a desire does exist in me. Except that he has something better to do in trying to instill life into the creatures of his imagination.”
“In the evening or after the rain, the whole earth, its womb moist with a seed redolent of bitter almond, rests after having given herself to the sun all summer long. And again that scent hallows the union of man and earth and awakens in us the only really virile love in this world: ephemeral and noble.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Each chapter is a new frustration. And also a new beginning. It is not logic, but consistent method. The scope of that insistence constitutes the work’s tragic quality.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“In Paris it is possible to be homesick for space and a beating of wings.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Probably one has to live in Algiers for some time in order to realize how paralyzing an excess of nature’s bounty can be. There is nothing here for whoever would learn, educate himself, or better himself. This country has no lessons to teach. It neither promises nor affords glimpses. It is satisfied to give, but in abundance. It is completely accessible to the eyes, and you know it the moment you enjoy it. Its pleasures are without remedy and its joys without hope. Above all, it requires clairvoyant souls—that is, without solace.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Strange country that gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and his misery!”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“In the neighborhood movies in Algiers peppermint lozenges are sometimes sold with, stamped in red, all that is necessary to the awakening of love: (1) questions: “When will you marry me?” “Do you love me?” and (2) replies: “Madly,” “Next spring.” After having prepared the way, you pass them to your neighbor, who answers likewise or else turns a deaf ear. At Belcourt marriages have been arranged this way and whole lives been pledged by the mere exchange of peppermint lozenges. And this really depicts the childlike people of this region.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The distinguishing mark of youth is perhaps a magnificent vocation for facile joys. But, above all, it is a haste to live that borders on waste.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But, all in all, I see nothing sacred in death and am well aware, on the other hand, of the distance there is between fear and respect. Everything here suggests the horror of dying in a country that invites one to live.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Between this sky and these faces turned toward it, nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion, but stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Is there anything odd in finding on earth that union that Plotinus longed for? Unity is expressed here in terms of sun and sea. The heart is sensitive to it through a certain savor of flesh which constitutes its bitterness and its grandeur.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I learn that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the sweep of days.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I know simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after my death? I am not expressing here the creature’s satisfaction with his condition.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. They try their skill at enjoyment and at “indulging in experiences.” But this is illusory. It requires a rare vocation to be a sensualist.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Gods of summer they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life, and they still are, deprived of all hope. I have seen two of them die. They were full of horror, but silent.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength?”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The desert itself has assumed significance; it has been glutted with poetry. For all the world’s sorrows it is a hallowed spot.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But at certain moments the heart wants nothing so much as spots devoid of poetry.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“It is possible to have less ambition and the same nostalgia.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“From Amsterdam Descartes writes to the aged Guez de Balzac: “I go out walking every day amid the confusion of a great crowd, with as much freedom and tranquillity as you could do on your garden paths.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“So much heavy beauty seems to come from another world.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“If the desert can be defined as a soulless place where the sky alone is king, then Oran is awaiting her prophets.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Books are written on Florence or Athens. Those cities have formed so many European minds that they must have a meaning. They have the means of moving to tears or of uplifting. They quiet a certain spiritual hunger whose bread is memory. But can one be moved by a city where nothing attracts the mind, where the very ugliness is anonymous, where the past is reduced to nothing? Emptiness, boredom, an indifferent sky, what are the charms of such places? Doubtless solitude and, perhaps, the human creature.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“The patience of a true enthusiast is unlimited.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“For force and violence are solitary gods. They contribute nothing to memory. On the contrary, they distribute their miracles by the handful in the present. They are made for this race without past which celebrates its communions around the prize ring. These are rather difficult rites but ones that simplify everything. Good and evil, winner and loser.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays