In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Speech is civilization itself.

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.