Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.

For a while I shall still be leaving, looking back at you as you slip away into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all are alive, believing that in a single poignant hour we did say all that we could ever say in a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind.

... let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.'

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

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.

Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.