The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.

In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.

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.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.