We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.

How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?

That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside.

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.