Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.

Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.