Someone who does not see a pane of glass is not aware of not seeing it.
Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.
Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.
The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.
Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data, brought together in the full light of demonstration, and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.
Time does us violence; it is the only violence.
Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.
The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.
I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.
Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.
An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.
Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
The notion of rights is linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity. It has a commercial flavor, essentially evocative of legal claims and arguments. Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at.
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
Nothing is less instructive than a machine.
Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.
The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
Conformity is an imitation of grace.
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
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