A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.

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.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

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.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

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

Serving humanity is not beneath spiritual pursuit

There is no such thing as magic. Just that which you do not understand.

If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit

To reach people no one else is reaching we must do things no one else is doing

It is a bigger miracle to be patient and refrain from anger than it is to control the demons which fly through the air.

The merit of a democratic regime rests on one's continual willingness to exchange views, and to compete on the basis of individual merit and capacities.

It's like soul music, isn't it all soul music? Otherwise what is it, non-soul music? I-have-no-soul music? Soulless music? People need to put a name on something to identify it, and I understand it.

I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms.