Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.

A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.

An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.

There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.