Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.
Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.
It isn’t happiness I am concerned with but experience.
True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.
Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.
Man's usual routine is to work and to dream and work and dream.
Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.
It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.
To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.
The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt...He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposition, subjected to his will, submissive to his own activity.
The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.
Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.
It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.
Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.
The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.
All societies are historical.
