Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.

Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.

At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction . . . and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.

For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

Almost everything comes from almost nothing.

Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind.