“We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.”

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.

We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.

One can always reason with reason.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get… what you regard as ‘too far’-and when others follow, as they will, move on.

Once people stop making excuses, stop blaming others, and take ownership of everything in their lives, they are compelled to take action to solve their problems.

All animals, including humans, need to see the connection between action and consequence in order to learn or react appropriately.

People only complain about things they can do something about.

I’ve done a lot of bad things. Use your imagination.

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.