The myth of Sisyphus

Inspired by the myth of the man condemned to ceaselessly push a rock up a mountain and watch it roll back to the valley below, The Myth of Sisyphus transformed twentieth-century philosophy with its impassioned argument for the value of life in a world without religious meaning.

• There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
• There are many causes for a suicide and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful.
• Living, naturally, is never easy.
• But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.
• The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgement and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand.
• The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
• The feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it.
• A man is always a prey to his truths. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.
• To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.
• In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.
• 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.
• The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.