We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.