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"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth livin..."

"It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, fo..."

"We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking...."

"Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place...."

"The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits...."

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they..."

"There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness...."

"Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in..."

"I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for th..."

"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable...."

"A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future...."

"The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have ..."

"For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it...."

"If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the ..."

"The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory...."

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

"Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object...."

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and..."

"People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves...."

"What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness...."

"It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about...."

"Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire...."

"In order to be cured, we must make our peace with this lucidity, this clairvoyance. We must take into account the glimps..."

"With rebellion, awareness is born...."

"Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that ..."

"Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day...."

"Conscious, he must be conscious, he must be conscious without deception, without cowardice, alone, face to face, at grip..."

"Lucidity too was a long patience. Everything could be won, earned, acquired. A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive..."

"To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that a..."

"I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to..."

"At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. ..."

"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world...."

"This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this ir..."

"This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this ir..."

"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself, so like a brother, really, I fe..."

"The final conclusion of the absurdist protest is, in fact, the rejection of suicide and persistence in that hopeless enc..."

"The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love save..."

"The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to...."

"The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that ..."

"A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly ..."

"Men die and they are not happy...."

"For a long time we both thought that this world had no ultimate meaning and that consequently we were cheated. I still t..."

"This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and th..."

"This world, as it is constituted, is not bearable. Therefore I have need of the moon, or of happiness, or immortality, o..."

"I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. Th..."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life ..."

"Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter...."

"Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it...."

"What's natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a..."

"There is no love of life without despair of life...."

"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable...."

"The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strang..."

"This world has no importance; once a man realizes that, he wins his freedom...."

"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful...."