Julien Benda

"If shame is cried upon him, … he will point out … that today he has to earn his living, and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which takes a pleasure in his productions."

"Philosophy, which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think therefore I am,” now raises him to say … “I think, therefore I am not,” ."

"One of the principle causes is that the modern world has made the clerc into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult…"

"That teaching according to which intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone."

"The modern moralists extol … the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life."

"I think I see another motive in the French writers who in 1914 adopted the attitude of M. Romain Rolland – the fear that they would fall into national partiality if they admitted that their nation was…"

"The desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action..."

"The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, … Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity …"