Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.

All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother.

I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.