Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.