Preface

  • resolve the problem of suicide
  • it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning
  • even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legititmate
  • even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism
  • “A lucid invitation to live and to create…”

p.2 - O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

p.3 - There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide…Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life… That truth was not worth the stake.

p.4 - I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying).

p.5 - killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.

p.10 - 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.

p.13 - Weariness comes at the end of the acts of mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows.

p.13 - Mere “anxiety” … is at the source of everything

p.14 - the absurd

p.17 - Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill.

p.19 - stop trying to understand everything. Stop trying to reduce it to something human

p.19 - 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. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

p.20 - I have peace only by refusing to know and to live…this world is absurd

p.20 - just live. trust the process.

p.26 - turning every idea [or thought] … into a privileged moment

p.30 - absurdity springs from comparison… It lies neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation… the Absurd is not in man … nor in the world, but in their presence together.

p.31 - the absurd is essential

p.31 - a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

p.32 - Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possibile explanation and interpretation, not the absense but the existence of transcendence?

p.33 - the absurd becomes god.

p.40 - intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of reason, I do not therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers.

p.41 - If man had no eternal consciousness…what would life be but despair?

p.42 - by trying to find meaning, we find meaning.

p.51 - I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me?

p.53 - He is asked to leap… he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands.

p.53 - It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience…

p.54 - The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive.

p.55 - That revolt gives life its value.

Be different! Be absurd!

p.55 - It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will. Suicide is a repudiation.

p.58 - In a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to which he imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave of his liberty.

p.59 - The return to consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep represent the first steps of absurd freedom.

p.60 - freedom has no meaning except in relation to limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.

p.62 - For the mistake is thinking that that quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our life when it depends solely on us… It is up to us to be conscious of them.

  • I note that this reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s This is Water.

p.64 - Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death — and I refuse suicide.

p.68 - It is essential to be absurd… it is not essential to be a dupe.

p.68 - A subclerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

p.69 - Everything that makes man work and get excited utilizes hope.

p.69 - In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.

  • I think it is referring to true unique, thought. Not just repeating what others are saying.

p.73 - There are those who are made for living and those who are made for loving.

p.78 - Live in the moment for yourself because no matter what you do, you will eventually be forgotten

p.84 - At the end of a life man notices that he has spent years becoming sure of a single truth. But a single truth, if it is obvious, is enought to guide existence.

p.86 - why I esteem the individual

p.87 - It is a man’s demands made against his fate

p.88 - If he aims to be something, it is in this life… But it is always ‘overcoming oneself’

p.88 - 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.

p.90 - Our fate stands before us and we provoke him. Less out of pride than our of awareness of our ineffectual condition.

p.91 - They are not striving to be better; they are attempting to be consistent. If the term “wise men” can be applied to the man who lives on what he has without speculating on what he has not, then they are wise men.

p.91 - do not create a scandal by posing as a judge

p.94 - For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

p.95 - The heart learns thus that the emotion delighting us when we see the world’s aspects comes to us not from its depth but from their diversity… a universe inexhaustible in quantity.

p.98 - If the world were clear, art would not exist.

p.99 - Expression begins where thought ends.

p.102 - stop trying to understand

p.103 - exercise in living

p.103 - 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 away for the end.

p.105 - he wants to take his own life because it “is his idea”

p.106 - he wants to kill himself to become god.

p.114 - work and create “for nothing”… one’s creation has no future… being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions.

p.115 - All that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time.

p.117 - I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought — revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter futility. In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths.

p.117 - None of all this has any real meaning.

p.117 - freedom in realization of that work, just becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to plunge into it with every excess. (fullfilment)

p.117 - Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty… man is the sole master.

p.120 - passion for life… he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

p.120 - Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding uphelf him? The worksman 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.

p.120 - it is what he thinks of during his decent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.

p.135 - existential thought … is steeped in a vast of hope.