Robert Zaretsky > Quotes

“Rousseau pounced. Men who dislike cats were tyrannical: "They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave.”
― Robert Zaretsky, The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

“In every guilty man, there is an element of innocence. This is what makes any absolute condemnation revolting. We do not think enough about pain" Albert Camus”
― Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning

“One would like to be loved, recognized, for what one is, and by everyone. But that is an adolescent desire. Sooner or later one must get old, agree to be judged, or sentenced, and to receive gifts of love … as unmerited. Morality is of no help. Only, truth … that is the uninterrupted seeking of it, the decision to tell it when one sees it, on every level, and to live it, gives a meaning, a direction to one’s march. But in an era of bad faith, the man who does not want to renounce separating true from false is condemned to a certain kind of exile - Albert Camus”
― Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning

“The absence of meaning is not a call to despair or an invitation to leap joyfully into the abyss. Instead, the world’s stubborn silence leads us to acknowledge our common predicament and spurs us to rebel against it.”
― Robert Zaretsky, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life

“Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.”
― Robert Zaretsky

“Absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world.”
― Robert Zaretsky

“As Camus’ reworking of the myth reveals, liberty can be found in the oddest of places—even Oran or Hades.”
― Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning

“Camus felt defenseless against these “deep forces rising within me that said ‘no.’ ” No, in a word, to plans for the future, to talk about tomorrow, to things not yet done. Instead, Camus demands the weight of the present, of the earth, of a world shorn of its myths and faith in anything other than what we can see and touch and feel.”
― Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning

“She kept to her bed only for the last two days, and did not stop conversing peaceably with everyone. Finally, no longer speaking, and already in the throes of agony, she made a big fart. 'Good,' she said, 'a woman who farts is not dead.' These were the last words she pronounced.”
― Robert Zaretsky, The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

“In one of her last works, The Need for Roots, she wrote: “There exists an obligation towards every human being for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition requiring to be fulfilled, and even without any recognition of such obligation on the part of the individual concerned.”
― Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

“It is as if I were beginning the game all over again, neither happier nor unhappier than before. But aware now of where my strength lies, scornful of my own vanities,”
― Robert Zaretsky, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life