“Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.”

Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest… But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.

If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.

The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.

Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.

With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.

Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.

We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.

If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If he says perhaps he means no. And if he says no, he’s the hell of a diplomat.

I tried to find a language for the film – not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain.

I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.

To share a lot of ideas – not ideas – emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

An old woman I loved very much when I was young – the wife of Jean Villard – she’s just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That’s all she does.

Let life unfold, say what you mean.

Men spend their life down here in the worship of petty (or mean) interests and the search of perishable things, and with that (“et avec cela”, Fr.) they pretend to perpetuate for all eternity their self (“moi”, Fr.) so hardly worthy (“digne”, Fr.) of it.

If the preservation of the home means the enslavement of women, economically or morally, then we had better break it.