Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

Those who feel guilty are afraid; and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.

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

We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves.

There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.