Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.

We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption, but how near or distant that is, nobody knows- not even God.

One must repay good and ill; but why just to the person who did us good or ill?

The disgust with dirt can be so great that it keeps us from cleaning ourselves--from "justifying" ourselves.

In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.