The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all.

The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest.

Time does us violence; it is the only violence.

Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.