There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.

If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.

Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.