The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.
Power without abuse loses its charm.
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!
Do you not realise that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis?
A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
Every man expects some miracle – either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease.
In most cases, when the lion, weary of obeying its master, has torn and devoured him, its nerves are pacified and it looks round for another master before whom to grovel.
All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.