"You cannot create experience. You must undergo it"
About this Quote
The second sentence tightens the screw. "You must undergo it" shifts agency into a paradox: you choose, at best, your exposure. The verb is physical, even medical; it suggests endurance, submission, and the body keeping score. Undergoing is what you do in an exam, a storm, an operation. Camus is smuggling in his existential ethics: meaning isn't manufactured in the workshop of ideas, it emerges in the pressure chamber of living, where certainty breaks and you find out what you actually are.
In context, this sits neatly with Camus' broader suspicion of consoling narratives. The absurd isn't a concept you adopt; it's what you meet when your desire for coherence hits the world's silence. That encounter can't be simulated by reading, theorizing, or performing intensity for an audience. It's also a quiet rebuke to romanticized suffering: he isn't glamorizing pain, he's insisting on contact. The only honest route to knowledge is exposure to consequences, time, other people, and the unglamorous accumulation of days.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|---|
| Source | Albert Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe), 1942; commonly cited line: "You cannot create experience. You must undergo it." |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Camus, Albert. (2026, January 18). You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-cannot-create-experience-you-must-undergo-it-22920/
Chicago Style
Camus, Albert. "You cannot create experience. You must undergo it." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-cannot-create-experience-you-must-undergo-it-22920/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"You cannot create experience. You must undergo it." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-cannot-create-experience-you-must-undergo-it-22920/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.








