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.

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

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.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

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