The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.

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

The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.

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.

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.