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

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

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

Law is born from despair of human nature.