The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.

Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.

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.

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

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.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.