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

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.

But I just wonder what it would be like to be able to go places without people recognizing me.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

When employers tell me they prefer married men, and encourage their men to have homes of their own, because it makes them so much steadier, I wonder if they have any idea of all that that implies.

And I, uh, I wonder how anybody can think his personality changes with his success. I've had quite a bit of success but I feel that I'm just the same person as I always was.

If I'd been easily discouraged, I could have been a one-hit wonder.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

I always admired Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk - but I don't know if I'd be a very convincing hulk.

I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

I don't want to be a one-hit wonder.

There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.

I wonder if that's hurt me at the box office. Maybe audiences these days want to know exactly what to expect when they go into a movie, and my movies are hard to explain in just one way.

I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.