“What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.”

“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.”

“Law is born from despair of human nature.”

“Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.”

“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.”

“I am I plus my circumstances.”

“We cannot put off living until we are ready.”

“An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.”

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

“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”

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