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...

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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.

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.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like...

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.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.