Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.

Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Pioneering is the work of individuals.

It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.