It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.

I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.

Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.