We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
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.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
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.
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
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.
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
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.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
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.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
