I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

The line contrasts outward achievement (“great deeds”) with inward capacity (“great emotion”), suggesting that moral or historical action alone is insufficient to make a person fully admirable or even fully human. The speaker’s “leaves me cold” implies that without deep feeling—empathy, love, grief, awe—heroic acts can seem mechanical, ideological, or inhuman. In Camus’s broader ethical sensibility, this aligns with suspicion of abstract causes pursued without human warmth: action divorced from lived, felt solidarity risks becoming sterile or cruel. The quote thus elevates emotional depth as a criterion for genuine greatness, not as sentimentality but as the affective grounding that keeps action connected to human reality.