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.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.