experiencing life through an always-nuanced worldview.

These are quotes taken from his The Myth of Sisyphus. I’m not finished with the book yet, but thus far these are the ones I liked. The page numbers correlate with the book published by Vintage International.

A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger…This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity (p6).

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking…The essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding…The typical act of eluding..is hope. Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it meaning, and betray it (p8).

The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue (p10).

For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it (p13).

That revolt of the flesh is the absurd…that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd (p14).

This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this “nausea,”…is also the absurd (p15).

The mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought (p17).

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction (p19).

This world in itself is not unreasonable…What is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world (p21).

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…The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter — these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable (p28).

The absurd becomes god (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything (p33).

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me–that is what I understand (p51).

What he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this is at least a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal (p53).

That revolt gives life its value…That discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle have something exceptional about them (p55).

I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone (p55).

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 (p123).