In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless.

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.

That which does not destroy, strengthens.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing.

Pity is extolled as the virtue of prostitutes.

Winter, a bad guest, sitteth with me at home; blue are my hands with his friendly handshaking