The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.