“Everything that is possible demands to exist.”

The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypotheses, is like the art of deciphering, in which an ingenious conjecture often greatly shortens the road.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

The past is pregnant with the present.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

The knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need.

Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.

I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.

The words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.

The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.

It is God who is the ultimate reason things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.

Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.

To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.

It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.

What is is what must be.

Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

Some [actors] are really a pain in the ass today. I held out on getting an assistant forever because I didn’t want to seem demanding… or like a pain in the ass. I didn’t want someone working for me to hate me.

Now, being a model and an actor, I’m trying to learn more as my profession demands it.

Cinema is changing every week, and multiplex audiences are demanding every week.

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

Art for me…is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.