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

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.

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

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.

Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way

The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.