The will to be oneself is heroism

Love is exclusivity, selection.

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 poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.