The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.