Mother of Marvels, mysterious and tender Nature, why do we not live more in thee.

Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.

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

Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or, rather, have made it desired.

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.

The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance -- that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.

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.