Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.

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.

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves.

[I am not] the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

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