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

It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.

Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands between that person and death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. "Losing one's head," language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience.

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

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.

And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.