The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome.

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.