Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.

It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.

What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.

Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.