No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.