Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
The Bible was written by fallible human beings.
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
Let no man despise the oracles of books! A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh and motion and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.
No man has ceased to believe in God before having decided that he should not exist; no book would produce atheism, and no book can restore faith.
When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.
As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.