Quotes About Sisyphus

Wir müssen uns Milarepa als glücklichen Menschen vorstellen, so wie Albert Camus uns Sisyphos beschreibt. Auch mein Weg, mein Optimismus, mein Humor, meine Lebensfreude sind zuallererst der Fähigkeit geschuldet, Sinn zu stiften. Sind doch Sinn und das Absurde untrennbar miteinander verwoben. Wie Leben und Tod auch.

At present they [philosophers] seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?

To ask for power is forcing uphill a stone which after all rolls back again from the summit and seeks in headlong haste the levels of the plain.

Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman's belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night The mountaintop is not in sight Because there is no mountaintop Poor Sisyphus grief I did not know I would struggle Through a ragged underbrush Without an upward path ... Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That's why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day.

I'm not Sisyphus trying to restrain death. Illyria is a soldier. If it's her time, it's her time. I'm not at war with Atropos. It's her will to take us whenever she likes. My only goal is to die with dignity. (Stryker)

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I knew that life was pointless, but I couldn't give up on it.

On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity.

It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again—and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill.

In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent.

The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, "with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion," was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death.

sense of the triumph of life over death is at the core of The Myth of Sisyphus with its austere message: in the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth.

Society is a long series of uprising ridges which from the first to the last offer no valley of repose; wherever you take your stand, you are looked down upon by those above you, and reviled and pelted by those below you. Every creature you see is a farthing Sisyphus, pushing his little stone up some Lilliputian mole-hill.

Scratching their nails on the blackboard of futility.

LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE is dense, epigrammatic, and of a deceptive clarity. It looks like a short essay, without technical jargon, cryptic sometimes to a fault. In it, Camus spoke of the world, history, and of his life.