The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.