Sisyphus Quotes

For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.

None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

Society is a long series of uprising ridges, which from the first to the last offer no valley of repose. Whenever you take your stand, you are looked down upon by those above you, and reviled and pelted by those below you. Every creature you see is a farthing Sisyphus, pushing his little stone up some Liliputian mole-hill. This is our world.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

With useless endeavour Forever, forever, Is Sisyphus rolling His stone up the mountain!

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Either you pursue or push, O Sisyphus, the stone destined to keep rolling. [Lat., Aut petis aut urgues ruiturum, Sisyphe, saxum.]

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

In "The Myth of Sisyphus", his most important non-fiction work, Albert Camus suggested that if we believed what most people claim to be the purpose of life, we would feel compelled to commit suicide. If, however, we accept that life has no purpose we would be inclined to soldier on in a cussed, stoical manner like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up a hill only to see it roll down again.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

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. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

'Yea and I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. He was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the shameless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

Interpretation is a task that we repeatedly have to take up and start again from the beginning, Sisyphus-like. But, as Camus said, we must always imagine Sisyphus happy, and this is not so difficult when it's a matter of texts that reveal important truths about being human.

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

If you tell your troubles to God, you put them into the grave; they will never rise again when you have committed them to Him. If you roll your burden anywhere else, it will roll back again like the stone of Sisyphus.

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.

Just about everything in this world is easier said than done, with the exception of 'systematically assisting Sisyphus's stealthy, syst-susceptible sister,' which is easier done than said.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

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 between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.