“Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”

Mystery is never more than a mirage that vanishes as we draw near to look at it.

A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.

That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

He reflected. ‘I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

You said something very true the other day: that for us, nudity begins with the face.

But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.

There’s something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.

Weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

The perfect knowledge of events cannot be acquired without divine inspiration, since all prophetic inspiration receives its prime motivating force from God the creator, then from good fortune and nature.

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.

A lottery is a taxation on all of the fools in creation.

God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

Understanding created by the intellect cannot be acquired by means of the occult, only by the aid of the zodiac, bringing forth that small flame by whose light part of the future may be discerned.

The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.