Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.