An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.