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

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

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.

I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

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

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?