Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.

We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.

It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.

... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.