Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.
One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.
Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
We only think when we are confronted with problems.
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.
To me faith means not worrying.
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
To receive everything, one must open one's hands and give.
If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.
Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.
Think with your whole body.
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.
In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.
I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.
