I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

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

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

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

If the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time - and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.