Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.

The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.

I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.

We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.

It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.