The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.