...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.