Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.