Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

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.

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.