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.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

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.

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

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.