In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder--but not the ladder.

One must cease letting oneself be eaten when one tastes best: that is known to those who want to be loved long.

Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape.

Heaping glowing coals on another person's head is usually misunderstood and comes to nothing because the other person knows just as well that he is in the right and has also given some thought on his own part to heaping coals.

Having become conscious of the truth he once perceived, man now sees only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolic element in Ophelia's fate, he now recognizes the wisdom of the woodland god, Silenus: it nauseates him.

In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.