Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.

Faith makes blessed. Consequently it lies.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

The Refinement of Shame. People are not ashamed to think something foul, but they are ashamed when they think these foul thoughts are attributed to them.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.

Perhaps no one as yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is.

The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.