“Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.”

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”

“I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”

“Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when the presume to anticipate custom.”

“Those sages of the ancient world, unbound by dogma of any kind, thought as we do in terms of physics, or rather, physiology, as applied to the whole universe: they envisaged the end of man and the dying out of this sphere.”

“He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”

“I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.”