Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all it means.