There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.

These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.

If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.