The vital spirit. L'élan vital

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?

The universe... is a machine for the making of gods.