 An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. |
| We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving. |
| Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts. |
| In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will. |
| To live is to feel oneself lost. |
| We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it. |
| For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great. |
| I am I plus my circumstances. |
| Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself. |
| A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation. |
| The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. |
| We cannot put off living until we are ready. |
| Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. |
| Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else. |
| The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent. |
| Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. |
| We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself. |
| The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. |
| Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be. |
| An idea is a putting truth in check-mate. |
