Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.