Love Quote by Albert Camus

Camus is smuggling a hard-won tenderness into a sentence that sounds almost pastoral. “Exhausted” is the key verb: it’s not about sampling life, or even enduring it, but wringing an experience dry until it can’t keep feeding your ego, your fantasies, your grievance. Only then, he suggests, does reverence become possible. Not the reverence of the tourist, dazzled and ignorant, but the reverence that arrives after repetition, disappointment, and the slow collapse of illusion.

The subtext is classic Camus: meaning isn’t discovered as a hidden prize; it’s manufactured through full contact with the world, including its boredom and pain. “Love” here isn’t romantic uplift. It’s a disciplined affection for what remains once you’ve stopped demanding that life justify itself. Exhaustion becomes a moral filter: when you can no longer use an experience as proof you’re special, or cursed, or destined, you can finally see it as it is-and that clear-eyed seeing turns into care.

Contextually, this sits comfortably beside The Myth of Sisyphus and the broader absurdist project. Camus rejects the temptation to escape through false consolation; he also rejects nihilism’s cheap sneer. The move is more radical: go all the way through the experience, refuse shortcuts, and you may arrive at a reverence that isn’t naïve. It’s love without alibis, earned by staying.