Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.

Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.

Buying is a profound pleasure.