The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

Beauty is a rebellion against time.

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.

we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment--beyond that boundary.