“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.”
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Absurd Man
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Albert Camus 209
French author and journalist 1913–1960Related quotes
The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century
“Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.”
Cassandra (1860)
Context: Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.
“Science does not permit exceptions.”
Lessons of Experimental Pathology (1855-1856)
“Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”
quoted by Gary Wolf in "The Curse of Xanadu" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html in Wired (6/1995)
Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 90
Sparks
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
Context: Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.
“Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.”
Source: The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
“It is true I have not told you everything. Why should I? No Author ever does….”
The Epilogue : Which is the proper ending of all comedies; and heralds, it may be, an afterpiece.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Context: It is true I have not told you everything. Why should I? No Author ever does.... With Felix Kennaston — or, if you prefer it so, with Horvendile, — rests safe this secret and peculiar knowledge as to how the life of Manuel may yet repair to it's first home after some seven centuries of exile. Thus will the traveller return — by and by — to the place of his starting; the legend of the second coming of the Redeemer will be justified, in, at all events, my lesser world; and the tale to Manuel's life will have come again, as it did once beside the pool of Haranton, full circle.