Albert Camus quotes for UPSC

Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day. 18px|frameless QOTD 2007·11·07 Sound file

...there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.

Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.

There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Idleness is only fatal to the mediocre.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to the present.

A scourge is not on a human scale, and so people say it isn't real; it's a bad dream that will pass. But is doesn't always pass, and, from bad dream to bad dream, it's the humans who pass, and the humanists first, because they didn't heed the warnings.