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

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.

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.

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.

I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out.

Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.

Those who are clever, who have a brain, never understand anything.

The brain is a muscle that can move the world.

If you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.

Only fools use their mouth to speak. A smart man uses his brain, and a wise man uses his heart.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

The best brains of the nation may be found on the last benches of the classroom.