Guitton's Quotes of Merit

Quoted in: A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work:

Regarding the student's workplace--"Some need an atmosphere....with books, papers, and a disorder in the midst of which, as Victor Hugo put it, their inspiration "squats."

"Tolerate nothing near you, Ruskin said, that you do not find either useful or beautiful."

"Let us dispense with all automatic solutions," Foch used to tell his classes at the War College. "Let us first have general principles, then let us apply these principles to the case at hand, which is always new and fresh, and let us keep asking ourselves the question that the mind tends to neglect: What is the objective?"

"You must keep telling yourselves that in your work every [delay]--assuming that the work is soundly launched--represents one more "chance to reap ripe fruit." One bitter day Sainte-Beuve wrote in his diary: 'To ripen, O, to ripen! One grows tough here, rotten there, but one does not ripen.'"

"I do not know of any finished work," Valery said once, "I know only of abandoned work."

"Subdue your thirst for books," Marcus Aurelius said, "so that you may die not babbling but at peace."