Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.

All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.

The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.

Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.

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

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.