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

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

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

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.

Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.