Quotes from Albert Camus

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.

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

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

Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.

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

If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.

The act of love is a confession.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

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.

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.

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.

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

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.

There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

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

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

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

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.

Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.

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

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.