The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. . . . For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.