The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

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.

The trend toward pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence— just art with no other pretenses.

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.

Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

To excel the past we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it; on the contrary, we must feel it under our feet because we raised ourselves upon it.