All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.

It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling.

And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.