Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.
With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.
The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.
If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.
One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world
Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
The struggle with the past is not a hand-to-hand fight. The future overcomes it by swallowing it. If it leaves anything outside it is lost.
And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.