With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

The real magic wand is the child's own mind.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.