That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.

When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.

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

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

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.