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.

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

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.

Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved.

To excel the past we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it; on the contrary, we must feel it under our feet because we raised ourselves upon it.

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

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.

Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man’s inner destiny sets it.