"A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity."
— Albert Camus - “An Absurd Reasoning,” The Myth of Sisyphus
"In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it."
— Albert Camus - “An Absurd Reasoning,” The Myth of Sisyphus
"I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life…On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life if not worth living. 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). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."
— Albert Camus - “An Absurd Reasoning,” The Myth of Sisyphus
"There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night."
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
(Source: frenchtwist, via fuckyeahexistentialism)
"Every question is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness."
— Martin Heidegger - Being and Time
"The indefinability of being does not dispense with the question of meaning but forces it upon us."
— Martin Heidegger - Being and Time
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
(Source: man-of-prose)
"Suppose someone gets the serise of numbers 1, 3, 5, 7,… by working out the series 2x + 1. And now he ask himself:
“But am I always doing the same thing, or something different everytime?”
If from one day to the next you promise “To-morrow I will come to see you”- are you saying the same thing everyday, or everyday something different"
— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
(Source: daseininthestreet, via philossofos)
"There was a night in the history of humanity when a man weighed down with all his destiny looked at his sleeping companions and, alone in a silent world, declared that no one must sleep, but that all must watch to the end of time. We are still living in times like these."
— Albert Camus - from an article in Soir-Republicain
"What am I doing here, what is the point of these smiles and gestures? My home is neither here nor elsewhere. And the world has become merely unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. Foreign - who can know what this word means?"
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"Many men who glory in the senses do so only because they are slaves to them. Here, too, they embrace the vulture which is eating them away."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow or beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine."
— Plotinus (ca. 205–270 CE)
(Source: heartbloodspirit, via portionsofeternity)
"Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75"
— Benjamin Franklin
"One evening, when we look in the mirror, we see a deeper line around our mouth. What is it? The stuff from which I made the happiness I overcame."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
"If it is true that the absurd has been fulfilled (or, rather, revealed), then it follows that no experience has any value in itself, and that all our actions are equally instructive. The will is nothing. Acceptance is everything. On one condition: that, faced with the humblest or the most heart-rending experience, man should always be ‘present’; and that he should endure this experience without flinching, with complete lucidity."
— Albert Camus - Notebooks
