Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!

The proper study of mankind is books.

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

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.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.