The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

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.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.