Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

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.

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.

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.

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

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.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

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.

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

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.

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.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.

Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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.

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.

I am I plus my circumstances.

The bronze powder business, however, no longer required my personal attention, and was well managed by those I had chosen as the guardians of a secret, which was long and honourably kept.

The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy.

The constant attention is what is so difficult.

As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.

Anytime you have a difficult encounter with your child, there is a good chance that at least one of these factors is bringing out the worst in him or her: transitions, time pressure, competition for your attention, conflicting objectives.

I think it would have been a lot better for him to say, I did it and I'm sorry, McGwire was never one to show a lot of emotion on the field, not a player who sought attention and craved to be thought of as a nice guy.

I wanted to write a story that demanded the viewer's attention.

After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.

I don't want to come off like the jealous brother who wasn't getting the attention, but it was like no one was really into me anyway. I wasn't really a priority.

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.

There's a lot of other movies I like, but I don't even pay attention to directors to tell you the truth.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.