Albert Camus - Love Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

View all Albert Camus Quotes
There is not love of life without despair about life.

Albert Camus
I conceived at least one great love in my life, of which I was always the object.

Albert Camus
There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.

Albert Camus
As for those whose role it is to love us - I mean, relatives and in-laws (what a word)- It's a different tune. They find the right word, but it's usually the one that wounds.

Albert Camus
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

Albert Camus
And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.

Albert Camus
He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Albert Camus
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Albert Camus
No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

Albert Camus
That's the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can't love without self-love.

Albert Camus
Let's not beat around the bush; I love life — that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

Albert Camus
People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.

Albert Camus
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Albert Camus
Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.

Albert Camus
The act of love... is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.

Albert Camus
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Albert Camus
Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.

Albert Camus
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

Albert Camus
Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

Albert Camus
Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

Albert Camus
We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.

Albert Camus
There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

Albert Camus
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

Albert Camus
In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.

Albert Camus
There was a time when I didn't at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one's fellow man, or merely say evil of one's neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.

Albert Camus
At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she—or he—would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.

Albert Camus
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.

Albert Camus
Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

Albert Camus
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

Albert Camus
Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.

Albert Camus