"it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning."
"...killing yourself amounts to confessing...that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it."
"one day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. "begins'- this is important. weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. it awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. what follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. at the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery."
"the world evades us because it becomes itself again."
"men, too, secrete the inhuman. at certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspects of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them."
"in reality there is no experience of death. properly speaking, nothing has been but what has been lived and made conscious."
"is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?"
"so that science was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art."
"man stands face to face with the irrational. he feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
"the absurd is essentially a divorce. it lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation."
"absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together."
"absurd: a confrontation and an unceasing struggle."
"[that] struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). everything that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements (and to begin with consent which overthrows divorce) ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. the absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to."
"a man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it."
"all existential philosophies without exception suggest escape. through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. that forced hope is religious in all of them."
"the only true solution...is precisely where human judgment sees no solution. otherwise, what need would we have of God? we turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. as for the possible men suffice."
"the more hideous his face, the more he asserts his power. his greatness is his incoherence. his proof is his inhumanity" - on God
"to Chestov reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. to an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason."
the absurd man "recognizes the struggle, does not absolutely scorn reason, and admits the irrational...he knows...there is no further place for hope."
"the absurd is sin without God"
"everything considered, a determined soul will always manage."
"they always lay claim to the eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the leap."
"in truth the way matters but little; the will to arrive suffices."
"sin is not so much knowing as wanting to know."
'the danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. being able to remain on that dizzying crest-that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge."
"he wants to find out if he can live without appeal"
"[life] will be lived better if it has no meaning."
"it is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity"
"it is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope."
"that revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the registration that ought to accompany it....that revolt gives life its value"
