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

Love is exclusivity, selection.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

It is not obligatory for a generation to have great men.

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.