Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty.
Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
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.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
