A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I've no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

An old mans memories, like his bones, grow sharp with age and show their true shapes.

No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.

Something you have to make...It's all work, work.