Quotations from Camus' "Sisyphus"

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.

I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

What counts is not the best living but the most living.

There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.

Integrity has no need of rules... 'Everything is permitted,' is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact.

If the world made sense, art would not exist.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.