Quotes from Robert Zaretsky

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.

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

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.

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

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.

As Camus' reworking of the myth reveals, liberty can be found in the oddest of places—even Oran or Hades.

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.

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

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.

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.