Key Ideas
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
The absurd is born in the confrontation between human need and the world’s unreasonable silence.
Philosophical suicide — Kierkegaard, Chestov, Jaspers leap to God.
Revolt, freedom, passion — the three consequences of the absurd.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Written alongside The Stranger, its fictional twin. See Sisyphus at the Foot of the Mountain.
Great Scenes
1Lines to Remember
2 quotationsThere is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux — c'est le suicide.
Context & when to use it
Whether life is worth living is the fundamental question — everything else is secondary.
To bring any abstract debate back to what matters; pair with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”.
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
Context & when to use it
The absurd hero, conscious of his fate, is superior to it.
For meaning without metaphysics, perseverance, the dignity of repetitive work.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsAbsurdism
Camus’s position — the conflict between our longing for meaning and the world’s silence cannot be resolved, only lived with in lucid revolt.
The Stranger
Camus’s first novel — Meursault, who will not pretend to feel what he does not feel, kills an Arab on a beach and is condemned for not weeping at his mother’s funeral.
The Rebel
Camus’s history of revolt — metaphysical and political — arguing that rebellion that kills for history betrays its own origin. It ended his friendship with Sartre.
Sartre vs. Camus
The most famous intellectual break of the twentieth century — two friends of the Resistance fall out in 1952 over revolution, violence, and The Rebel.
Samuel Beckett
Irish playwright, novelist and poet who wrote in English and French, the master of minimalism and the absurd — Waiting for Godot made a play in which “nothing happens, twice” into the defining drama of the twentieth century.
Hamlet
Shakespeare’s longest play — a prince ordered by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder thinks, doubts, delays, feigns madness, and dies in the act.