Simon Brass > Simon's Quotes

“If one could only say just once: 'this is clear', all would be saved”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“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.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“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. 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 which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! 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. 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 can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“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. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart - that is where it must be sought.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche