Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.