Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.

So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled.

Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even

In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.

Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe.

There is, how­ever, a strong empir­i­cal rea­son why we should cul­ti­vate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be use­ful. Man pos­i­tively needs gen­eral ideas & con­vic­tions that will give a mean­ing to his life & enable him to find a place for him­self in the uni­verse. He can stand the most incred­i­ble hard­ships when he is con­vinced that they make sense; he is crushed when on top of all his mis­for­tunes, he has to admit that he is tak­ing part in a ‘tale told by an idiot.’