The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.

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.

To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

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.

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.

Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.