The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom.

She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond", "What does?" "This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.