An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.