A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.

Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.