The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.