No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man, but not another.

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed.

I ought not to have listened to her,' he confided to me one day. 'One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace.

Man's progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.

The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.