Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.

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.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.

You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.