The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves.

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

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

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

I am I plus my circumstances.

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.

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