Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.

One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

They did not know what we can now guess at, contemplating the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence.

There's an infinite amount of hope but not for us.

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.