Albert Camus - Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus_ And Other Essays-Vintage (1991)

Highlights and notes

• Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes.

  highlight @ page 49, loc. 622-624

• my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.

  highlight @ page 57, loc. 733-733

• “It clearly seems that the chief thing in heaven and on earth is to obey at length and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind— something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine,”

  highlight @ page 57, loc. 735-737

• What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits.

  highlight @ page 59, loc. 751-753

• a man’s failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

  highlight @ page 61, loc. 781-781

• expend

  highlight @ page 61, loc. 782-782

• If it were essential on the stage to love as people really love, to employ that irreplaceable voice of the heart, to look as people contemplate in life, our speech would be in code. But here silences must make themselves heard. Love speaks up louder, and immobility itself becomes spectacular. The body is king, Not everyone can be “theatrical,” and this unjustly maligned word covers a whole aesthetic and a whole ethic.

  highlight @ page 71, loc. 909-912

• He breaks the spell chaining that soul, and at last the passions can rush onto their stage. They speak in every gesture; they live only through shouts and cries. Thus the actor creates his characters for display. He outlines or sculptures them and slips into their imaginary form, transfusing his blood into their phantoms.

  highlight @ page 71, loc. 913-915

• Eternal values survive secular turmoils before their astonished eyes.

  highlight @ page 75, loc. 966-966

• But this comes from the fact that in a flash he felt the amazing grandeur of the human mind. The conquerors are merely those among men who are conscious enough of their strength to be sure of living constantly on those heights and fully aware of that grandeur.

  highlight @ page 77, loc. 996-998

• In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly.

  highlight @ page 81, loc. 1050-1051

• The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. It is lucid thought that provokes it, but in that very act that thought repudiates itself.

  highlight @ page 84, loc. 1089-1090

• second, a fecund work because of a whole implied experience, the wealth of which is suspected. The problem for the absurd artist is to acquire this savoir-vivre which transcends savoir-faire. And in the end, the great artist under this climate is, above all, a great living being, it being understood that living in this case is just as

  highlight @ page 85, loc. 1099-1101

• The problem for the absurd artist is to acquire this savoir-vivre which transcends savoir-faire. And in the end, the great artist under this climate is, above all, a great living being, it being understood that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting. The work then embodies an intellectual drama. The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist.

  highlight @ page 85, loc. 1100-1103

• The problem for the absurd artist is to acquire this savoir-vivre which transcends savoir-faire. And in the end, the great artist under this climate is, above all, a great living being, it being understood that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting. The work then embodies an intellectual drama. The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that

  highlight @ page 85, loc. 1100-1103

• To think is first of all to create a world

  highlight @ page 86, loc. 1112-1112

• That approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent. There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But it is essential to find the middle path leading to the faces of man.

  highlight @ page 89, loc. 1152-1154

• What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems.

  highlight @ page 90, loc. 1162-1163

• Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time.

  highlight @ page 99, loc. 1286-1289

• Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.

  highlight @ page 101, loc. 1315-1316

• “I conclude that all is well,” says Œdipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

  highlight @ page 105, loc. 1358-1360

• “I conclude that all is well,” says Œdipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.     All

  highlight @ page 105, loc. 1358-1360

• 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.

  highlight @ page 105, loc. 1370-1372

• 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.

  highlight @ page 106, loc. 1370-1372

• In any case, I learn not to separate these creatures bursting with violent energy from the sky where their desires whirl.

  highlight @ page 124, loc. 1601-1602

• And to live is not to resign oneself. This, at least, is the bitter lesson of Algerian summers. But already the season is wavering and summer totters. The first September rains, after such violence and hardening, are like the liberated earth’s first tears, as if for a few days this country tried its hand at tenderness.

  highlight @ page 130, loc. 1676-1678

• These are, in truth, the parliaments of birds that are met in Hindu literature. But no one on the boulevards of Oran debates the problem of being or worries about the way to perfection. There remains nothing but flappings of wings, plumed struttings, coquettish and victorious graces, a great burst of carefree song that disappears with the night.

  highlight @ page 137, loc. 1760-1762

• But it is no less true that man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood

  highlight @ page 158, loc. 2032-2034

• But it is no less true that man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it.

  highlight @ page 158, loc. 2032-2034

• O midday thought, the Trojan war is being fought far from the battlefields! Once more the dreadful walls of the modern city will fall to deliver up—“soul serene as the ocean’s calm”—the beauty of Helen.

  highlight @ page 159, loc. 2046-2048

• For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

  highlight @ page 166, loc. 2125-2127

• I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger than our new constructions or our bomb damage. There the world began over again every day in an ever new light.

  highlight @ page 166, loc. 2131-2132

• 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. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

  highlight @ page 167, loc. 2132-2134

• There is thus a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most in this world.

  highlight @ page 167, loc. 2142-2143

• There is thus a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most

  highlight @ page 167, loc. 2142-2142

• He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank, neither higher nor lower, with all those who are working and struggling. His very vocation, in the face of oppression, is to open the prisons and to give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all.

  highlight @ page 175, loc. 2224-2226

• 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.

  highlight @ page 175, loc. 2228-2229