Paul Claudel Quotes

Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most people?

Birth is a beautiful thing.

Love is the reason you were born.

Everybody has to learn for the first time.

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

Knowledge is more important than life. We've only one excuse for existing, to think, to find out, to learn.

The two most mysterious things in our lives are birth and death. They are both miraculous events; one brings shiny, brand new life into the world, and the other snuffs it out like that. That person isn't there anymore.

But do you want this? It's not much of a life. Don't you see? It's the first life I've had in four hundred years. With you--in the only way that matters--I'm alive again.

Life, it's life we deal with...He that sees the light And knows the light Shall live.

Every moment of searching is a moment of encounter.

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

They say the two most important days in a person's life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere and into here.

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

The supreme adventure is being BORN

What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

To know where a thing is we must have found it.

A living thing is born.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

You are whole and also part of larger and larger circles of wholeness you many not even know about. You are never alone. And you already belong. You belong to humanity. You belong to life. You belong to this moment, this breath.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

Ignorance is death, knowledge is life. Life is of very little value, if it is a life in the dark, groping through ignorance and misery.