Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.

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.

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. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.