By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order.

Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving.

Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.