Life & Mortality Quote by Albert Camus

Camus is coming for the clean, narcotic comfort of moral purity. “To abandon oneself to principles” sounds noble in the abstract; he flips it into a kind of living suicide: the self handed over to an idea that can never hug you back. The sting is in the verb abandon. Principles aren’t something you hold; in Camus’s framing, they’re something you let swallow you. Once they do, you stop negotiating with reality, other people, your own contradictions. You become consistent, and therefore dead.

The line’s sharpest move is calling this sacrifice “an impossible love.” Camus is diagnosing a romance with the absolute: the fantasy that devotion to a system - political, religious, ethical - will finally dissolve ambiguity. But because principles are incapable of reciprocity, the “love” is structurally unrequited. That’s why he says it’s “the contrary of love.” Love, in his worldview, is embodied, imperfect, plural; it tolerates friction and change. The love of principles demands purity, and purity is a machine for excluding the messy human.

Context matters: Camus wrote in the shadow of totalitarian certainties and postwar ideological fervor, arguing with contemporaries who treated history like a tribunal and violence like a down payment on utopia. In works like The Rebel, he insists that once a principle becomes sacred, people become expendable. The subtext isn’t “have no values.” It’s a warning about value-worship: when fidelity to an idea matters more than fidelity to living beings, you’re not being principled - you’re practicing a kind of elegant cruelty.