Albert Camus Love Quotations

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

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

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

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.

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.

That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3

After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.

Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.

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

My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.

Old women even forget how to love their sons. The heart gets worn out, Monsieur.

I have not stopped loving that which is sacred in this world.

Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'

When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.

Betrayal answers betrayal, the mask of love is answered by the disappearance of love.

For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.

The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all.

The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.

At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.

[Love] is the type of disease that spares neither the intelligent nor the idiotic.

Indeed, men never know how to love. nothing satisfies them. All they know is to dream, to imagine new duties, to look for new countries and new homes. While we women, we know that we must hasten to love, to share the same bed, hold hands, and fear absence. When we women love, we dream of nothing.

Have pity, Lord, on those who love and are separated.

You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us

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

Why must one love rarely to love well?

Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves.

Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.

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

No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait.

The act of love is a confession.

For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.

One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.

True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.

To marry a woman who you love and who loves you is to lay a wager with her as to who will stop loving the other first

You see, a person of my acquaintance used to divide people into three categories: those who would prefer to have nothing to hide than have to lie, those who would rather lie than have nothing to hide, and finally those who love both lies and secrets.