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

There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descent and fall.

Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one

I am I plus my circumstances.

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

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.'

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.