The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

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.

It is not obligatory for a generation to have great men.

There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.

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

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.