So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.

Every virtue has its privilege: for example, that of contributing its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of one condemned.

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

We are doubly willing to jump into the water after some one who has fallen in, if there are people present who have not the courage to do so.

In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.