It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

Facts always are sensational.

A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?

Well, everybody has a history.

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.