Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.