Sow the living part of yourselves in the furrow of life.

We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.

Cure yourself of the inclination to bother about how you look to other people. Be concerned only . . . with the idea God has of you.

Those who say they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them that God exists. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, any anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-idea, not in God.

Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.

The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.