Albert Camus Passion Quotations

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.

Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.

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

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.

To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.

Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s only living insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the same for everyone.

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.