They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.

Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.