“An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.”
“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”
“Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.”
“Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.”
“Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.”
“To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.”
“Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.”
“For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.”
“An ''unemployed'' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.”
“Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
“I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.”
“Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.”
“We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”
“The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.”
“There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.”
“The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the cafT.”
“We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.”
“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.”
“A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.”
“The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.”
“Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.”
“The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.”
“The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.”
“Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.”
“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.”
“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.”
“By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.”