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

Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.

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

When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being "Paleolithic."

History is the science of people.

The struggle with the past is not a hand-to-hand fight. The future overcomes it by swallowing it. If it leaves anything outside it is lost.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.