To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out.

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.