The desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action... - Julien Benda

Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it… With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. … The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.

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,” (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with 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 of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. … The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions.