Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.