A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.

The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.

William James once said: "Progress is a terrible thing." It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?

People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent "the past" and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will.

We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.

History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.