Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching... just looked, simply and innocently.

Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.

Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.

When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn't inside us can't excite us.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

...Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.