Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.

I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.

There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.

Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.