 To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. |
| My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. |
| The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen. |
| The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right. |
| My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger. |
| Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. |
| De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history. |
| We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. |
| Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. |
| Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. |
| Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? |
| Maybe this world is another planet's hell. |
| Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. |
| Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. |
| Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. |
| So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. |
| It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.' |
| Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts. |
| Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder. |
| Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. |
