And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.

Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'

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.

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.