When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.

I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.

In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation in turn becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources - and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on in the future.