All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.

The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.

As one who knows many things, the humanist loves the world precisely because of its manifold nature and the opposing forces in itdo not frighten him. Nothing is further from him than the desire to resolve such conflictsand this is precisely the mark of the humanist spirit: not to evaluate contrasts as hostility but to seek human unity, that superior unity, for all that appears irreconcilable.

Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.

In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.

Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.