Quotes
"I tell you, Mr. Constant," he said genially, "it's a thankless job, telling people it's a hard, hard Universe they're in."
p. 25
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
p. 63
Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.
p. 33
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
p. 17
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
p. 39
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.
p. 29
Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?[…] What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.[…] The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.[…] Live!
Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity.
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.
The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
What was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of protein molecules that were too impossibly ingenious in structure.
