The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

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

We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

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

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.