Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.