What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.