We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.

I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.

Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.