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

The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.

Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of themAvoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.

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.